new cruncher not performing well

just put together a new machine i plan on running seti on 24/7 and its WU times are around 7 hours.. i donno what the heck is up it seems to be running great except for seti hehe.
any help much appreciated.

new system consists of..

epox 8k5a2+ MB
XP 1600
512 MB mushkin pc2700 DDR
radeon 8500le 128mb
WD 7200rpm 60 gig HD
SB live audigy platinum
windows XP pro

in sisoft sandra i get 4039/2014 in CPU and 2108/2004 in memory benchmarks. in 3dmark 2001se i get 8560. i dont know if these are ok for this system or not but seems acceptable to me please feel free to let me know if i am wrong on that.

i am running the command line client along with setidriver and setispy, no virus programs running, nothing extra running except MBM5.

im lost, i have tried deleting my seti folder and starting fresh and it ends up the same.

any ideas please ?

Are your HDD's set to turn off after a certain amount of time? Also, what are your RAM settings currently at in the BIOS? How high (if at all) is it overclocked?

HD is not set to power down, i am not sure what the exact ram settings are offhand but its set to cl2 with 4 way inteleave on, not overclocked at all yet as i wanted to let it burn in a lil befor i messed with anything hehe.

You might want to check the other thread down the page. Similar problems with slow times. Turned out it needed the Via 4in1 patches applied to fix some issues with XP.

yeah i saw that and went staright to via arena and DL the newest 4in1 hehe. didnt make any diference

The next logical step is to yell at it, maybe even get a little physical

OK, this is really basic, but when you shut SETI off and look at task manager, is there anything using up the CPU noticeably? You probably checked this already. It happened to me once where work units were taking 8-9 hours to complete, where normally it takes on 3.3 hours or so. Turns out Windows Media Player was in "not responding" mode and pegging 100% of the CPU. But a simply reboot would have taken care of this and I'm sure you probably reboot many times already. Good luck that stinks that that happens.

Excellent suggestion. I always have problems with Outlook not closing. It keeps the binary open using 30-40% of system resources when it appears to be closed. I always catch it on my laptop when nothing appears to be running, but the cpu fan won't stop. Task manager always shows Outlook as a process even though it's not open. I have to manually end it to get everything back to normal.