Strange Issue starting games or switching profiles Win7...

I am not 100% sure this is the proper place for this post but I figured since it had to do with the display I would start here. Heck I'm not even sure how best to describe it. My issue only occurs in a couple of places:

1.) Whenever I'm switching between my wifes windows profile and mine it takes a crazy amount of time and the display loses a signal for a quick second before coming back on. Once I am on the profile I don't see anything out of the ordinary unless I start certain applications.

2.) When I start a new game it takes a very long time to load and the screen will go black while loading. Also when if I'm vent when I start the game and someone is talking I'll here the last word they were speaking over and over before the game finally loads.

I notice this issue in other games as well typically around or after loading. It's not always at the start of the game either, it can be after a level loads for example.

My first guess was this was something driver related so I updated all my drivers which didn't help. Still suspecting drivers I recently reformatted and re-installed everything (as part of spring cleaning) and the problem was gone for a couple days before returning last night.

At this point I could really just use some help determining what is causing the issue (drivers, hardware, cpu, application, etc) and then I can begin to troubleshoot. Here are some details that may help determine the cause:

-AMD Phenom II X6
-Radeon 5970 XFX Black Edition
-Windows 7 64 bit

Any help/guidance would be greatly appreciated it. Normally I can figure out this kind of stuff on my own but this one has me stumped.

I've had the same thing happen to me after installing a couple of new games (Shogun 2 & Crysis 2). Starting a game would take much longer to load than usual (just a black screen) and even closing a game would take a while. Restarting the system solved the problem when loading the first game on the newly restarted system, but every game thereafter would go back to it's slow load and close.
Thinking back on what was different before I installed those games, I realized that they both installed a version of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistribution. So I went in and removed all extra versions of each year's version, leaving only the latest versions for both x64 and x86 versions for that year. Did this fix the problem? Yes it did. Do I recommend trying it? Maybe. The reason being is that the program that installed a particular version of the C++ Redistribution relies on the library's of that version and may not work correctly, or at all, if it's missing the version of the library that it needs (someone chime in on this if I'm wrong).
All I know is that the problem went away when I removed all those extra versions of the same year and I haven't had any problems with any other games or programs since removing the "extras." Before trying this, you may want to wait for someone else to reply to see what they think. What games do you have installed?