ya bloom is off,

sorry i have
asus a8v-deluxe 3500+
creative audigy2 zs
2g of ocz plat, rev 2
evga 7600 agp

well creative hasnt had an update since 2006,
and another problem i do have is my card or computer,, is very picky,
out fo the blue when i'm just loading windows the screen goes all multicolers and textured then freezes,
but i'm currently running 163.75, i had to roll back,

whats wierd is in the beginning of playing the game, it runs fine, but then after awhile it just starts to slow down.
and when i exit, it almost seems the process is still running. but it's not

Ovwrheating?

alright noted, but would that explain the fact the game makes my computer lag even when i have exited the game?

try turning down the games settings so it uses less memory, you dont need planets , ships and structures at there highest settings unless you zoom in on them to admire there glorious textures all the time, just keep ship effects up high.

That is a load of crap. The 7600 was a great midrange card when it was released and should have no problem running Sins.

Sins becomes rather CPU limited in big games with lots of units shooting at each other. I get crazy slowdown sometimes with my 2.5GHz Athlon64x2 3800+ and I have a 512MB 8800GT.

I run this game on an A64-3200 (2.0ghz OC'd to 2.4ghz), 512MB 3-3-3-8 Pc3200 Dual Channel RAM, and an EVGA 8600gt 256MB vidcard.

The game runs well on high settings all extras and max AA enabled @ 1360x768 with no slowdowns, except in large battles, and I'm talking about nearing 100 ships, and only when I'm zoomed in very closely on the battle. Considering how cheap these vidcards are and how much cheaper the older versions of the Geforce series are, you can't ask for anything better than that from this hardware at their respective prices. this game was built with older video cards in mind. Some people seem to want all the eye candy on old cards, and that is simply not possible, but that shouldn't keep you from running the game on lower settings just fine. I'm sure if I put everything to medium and removed a few of the extra eye candy from the options, I could probably run it smoothly in up close large scale battles. however, I don't think these slight slow downs are detrimental to game play, I find that I often don't have enough time to sit back and watch the battles for long anyways, and I can still zoom in close enough to see every ship and their weapons fire with no problem.

In short, sins is an excellent balance between 2d and 3d, and its requirements aren't as demanding as most games of today, but still delivers very decent graphics. where some games require a dual core or top of the line video card to even be play able today and still look good, sins doesn't.

yeah there are plenty of services you can access through the control panel under 'administrative options > services'. most of these you don't need or use. such as wireless config, unless you have a wireless router, or help and support, automatic updates, secondary login, print spooler, etc. these all take up resources in the background. also try disabling indexing service, and try defragging not only your hard drive, but your MFT to, just google 'defrag mft' to find out how. there is a program call tuneup utilities and it can defrag your registry, along with removing invalid entires and fixing any structural mistakes. these all help speed up your computer. try to get rid of any running background programs like Instant Messengers, you might find most in your taskbar, but for some you're going to have to go to run > msconfig > startup, and uncheck most of those. you shouldn't have any problems figuring out what to uncheck, but if you do, I suggest you find out what each program in that list is for. right now the latest stable driver from nvidia for XP is 169.21, try upgrading your DirectX to the november 2007 version.