Yeah... that would be a lot of horsepower for VA to use. Mine usually runs 0%-ish without any speech happening and then usually between .2% and 4%. I'm having a hard time making it hit 20% on this laptop even on initial startup. I was going to ask if you were running any kind of plugins and then was going to suggest that maybe your speech engine could be borked up, but, it looks like you've found the issue. The folks that are managing EDDI have asked me to take a look in there for them to see if there were some issues I could find (unrelated), but I will take a longer look around to see what could be up. This will not be this week tho, as I am out of town until Friday. Thanks for the update!