One thing is a givin. If you don't run adware or spybot or a similar program regularly your box is full of crap.
I ran spybot and adware yesterday, first time in a week. I had 18 trackers installed. They just don't sit there.
Ran spybot this morning and picked up two in 24 hours. As gamers most keep up on it. Some need to do a house cleaning.
I have friends ( non gamers ) that have me take a look at their box because they're having problems with this or that. The "average" online computer users box is so full of crap I'm surprised the damn thing boots

If it's a "family" computer I GUARANTY it has shovel loads of crap dumped in it every single day.
EVERY DAY.
A game box has to be lean and mean. Enditall, windoze updates, driver updates, adware, spybot, defrag, anti virus programs need to run ALL the time to keep it neat. I have 12 programs running on XP when I log on and three of them are my CH stuff. Thats nine programs running in XP. I'm lean but I'm running 26 programs before Enditall. Another axiom with drivers is, if it isn't broke DON'T FIX IT.
I'll bet you a six pack of cheep beers that alot of the current "ingame" problems being experienced by some would be solved by becoming down right anal about the box.
My reason being is I have two different boxes with two different operating systems, one an AMD 1.2, one a 3.0 P4, two different vid cards, one with a SATA drive the other without, one with onboard sound the other with a SB card and both run without problems.
Not to say that there are problems that are game related. Then again I don't run a firewall, I don't have my box networked. The more stuff running, the more possiblities there are.
ATI seems to give AH fits, and the cach issue is an ongoing thing. Get anal about the box, then if you still have problems, they be working on it.