Thanks everyone for the excellent suggestions. I am definitely pursuing the virus option since I believe that is the source of the problem. We had virus software running on all of our systems, but it interfered with mastercam so I was informed to "disable" it. I think it was a short-sighted solution and perhaps our company should have looked for a more "cooperative" solution for protection. Thanks again everyone.

None of these are on the internet. The virus theory has crossed my mind and I spent today re-installing MC8 on #3, which seems to have helped. I'm going to try #2 since it seems to be suffering the worst right now. I've used the "acceleration to none" trick, but it doesn't seem to be helping anymore(it was noticeable 6 months ago). Right now I'm operating on the corrupted/viral files theory and re-installing MC8. As far as cadcam's question about running anything else, it depends on the computer and again doesn't seem to make a difference either way(some have cadkey,word,excel,etc). Thanks for all input, I think that I'm just going to have to try virus scanning, fresh installations and hope for the best. I will keep watching and hoping for any other insight that may come along.

Okay, here goes. 1)Quantex PII 400 128MG STB Nitro 3D(Virge/GX)1024x768 256 colors 2)Gateway GP7-600 128MG NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 1280x1024 256 colors 3)Gateway PIII-800 256MG NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 1280x1024 256 colors All of our systems are running NT 4.0 with SP6. We are using a TC/PIP network with mapped drives for various storage. There doesn't seem to be any relation here because they act the same whether we're on the network or not. I also have everyone work locally rather than tying up network resourses for generating toolpaths. There are also others that have these symptoms, but this is a fair cross-section. All are configured with the standard MC8 config except database and toolpath allocations are bumped to take advantage of memory. Computer #2 has degraded to the point that it takes 5 or so minutes to actually display a toolpath backplot. A month ago it took a second or two. Computer #3 was having a problem with MC locking completely whenever another application was opened on top of it. Lowering the display settings to 256 colors seems to have fixed this for now.

We've been having increasing problems with our computers hanging for a couple of minutes while moving from one toolpath operation to another, or even task-switching to file manager or the like. I've tried changing display settings as well as memory settings to no avail. Any suggestions would be appreciated.