Sluggish After Exiting Games

Most probably due to Windows reclaiming the memory used to run whatever game you've just quit. Mine used to do that on occasion, but since I went upto 2GB it isn't really noticable anymore.
 
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RAM is usually the key. Keep an eye on your hard disk access light, you'll probably see that its flashing quite a lot where it thrashes around with your virtual memory.
 
Yep, as others have said it's mostly down to RAM.

My understanding is that when you launch a game it pushes a lot of the system stuff from memory to a pagefile (your hard disk). When you then exit a game it reloads a lot of this stuff from the pagefile back into memory, this is what causes the slowdown as accessing stuff from the pagefile is much slower that RAM.

After a while it loads most of it back into RAM and this is why after a minute or so everything seems back to normal. Increasing your memory can help with this. When I upgraded from 1gb to 2gb I noticed a big difference in my system becoming responsive a lot quicker after exiting the likes of BF2.

* - I reserve the right to be completely wrong as I'm no computer genius or anything ;)
 
ctrl-alt-tab to get task manager then look at the performance tab and the
'commit charge' & 'physical memory' sections.

Most likely your peak memory figure is close to your total physical ram which is ok for the program to run in, it has all it needs but it would most likely run faster for loading and unloading if you had more space to move in
 
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