First off, I am a long time user.  A passionate one.  I often say my slingbox is THE BEST PURCHASE I HAVE EVER MADE!!!

However I am having some strange performance on my new laptop.

My Slingbox is at my mothers home in Chicago, IL.  I got her massive upload speeds and historically I enjoy 800-1000 kbps streaming anywhere in the US and overseas.

At my home (in Tokyo, Japan) I have a fibre-optic internet connection with the following statistics from home (as rated by www.speedtest.net):

to Tokyo:
ping time:  8ms
Download Speed:  17,046 kb/s
Upload Speed:  9,105 kb/s

to Chicago:
ping time:  200ms
Download Speed:  1,563 kb/s
Upload Speed:  670 kb/s

I have PCs (2 laptops and 1 desktop) all running slingplayer 1.5.0.322.  My other laptop and my desktop all stream great, in that 800-1000 range.

My new work laptop pc is by far the highest powered pc I own.  2GB RAM, dualcore cpu, some ridiculous processor.  It runs XP.  Problem being that my new pc streams TERRIBLY.  The following is a test I just ran:

1)  On home desktop (at home).  Starts up, streams at 800-1000 kbps for hours at a time.
2)  On new laptop (at home).  Starts up, streams at 300-400 for 30 seconds or so, then drops to 80 kbps, stumbles there for 10-20 seconds, then streams back to 300-400 and repeat that sequence.
3)  Installed beta slingplayer (yes its only for "US" customers, not sure if I am or not, but my slingbox is in the US) and I get the same problem.  Streams at 300 then back to 80 and I find the new slingplayer much worse when streaming is poor, I think because of the recorded buffer.

This performance is bad at home and also at work.  I get the same results.  On another PC in the office, I have an older version of the slingplayer and it again works fine.  I have only ever gotten about 600kbps in the office.  But on my new laptop I get it streaming and optimizing at 80 with occasional bursts up to 400 for 30 seconds or so.  Basically unusable.

My new work pc runs some "work" things, but I have turned them all off (from the microsoft services) and still have the problem.  I have tried turning off the VMWare services, Oracle, Sybase, my antivirus, and a few other things.  I cant figure out why it wont work on this laptop!!!

Is there any diagnostic tools out there to help determine what is going on?  I began playing around with some "sysinternals" applications to monitor resources, but those largely confused me.  And I doubt it is a router problem, since other pcs at home and office are fine.

Can anyone offer any help?

Many many thanks in advance