Terminate and Stay Resident is a legacy term for background process, from the DOS days we referred to programs running in memory, such as "afterdark" or the MS mouse driver loaded in autoexec.exe a TSR. They consumed memory, precious base memory, and the fewer TSR's the better. Personally, I hate Windows and work primarily with UNIX environments, yet understand the necessary evil.
The machine is pristine for a developer's computer, relatively, as everything truly is relative, especially around here. Consider how bbunny invests time into providing links to each processes, while being helpful, and still insulting.
The fact is that background processes, which generate "any" IP traffic, do impact AH2. Although this game runs extremely well on low bandwidth connections, such as dialup, it is also very sensitive to the most brief of interruptions by low bandwidth TSR's, such as a Sun Java update checker.
What I don't understand is how some people merely warp about in the game, while others drop like a rock to the land of disconnect without any warning.
I've killed more of the background processes, which appeared to create occasional very light traffic (when watching tcpdump on the edge router) and believe there has been a benefit.
In three hours of connection I only received one disconnect. It is interesting to note that I never receive any warning, no messages in the game to indicate any connection problem, not even the beacon light.
Another interesting to note, nothing running in that process list ever cause connection problems with the handful of other online games I have used, such as Medal of Honor, Allied Assault, or Battlefield 1942.
note: The sun java updater doesn't appear in my task manager.
