180.29 driver sluggish (Firefox, WoW, etc.)

[tmwil]

I have a Geforce 8500 GT and I'm experiencing some really odd behavior with 180.29.

I've ran World of Warcraft with this card on Linux for awhile now. My system was Fedora 6 or so, but had been upgraded to Fedora 10. WoW still ran fine after that, but with the recent WoW patches (3.0.8 or .9) something happened to my fps.

At first my FPS would start out at around 50, then after a minute it would drop to about 4 FPS. So I figured I would upgrade to latest wine, nvidia driver, and kernel.

Well, that didn't work. Now I'm stuck at that 4 FPS and it never approaches the 50+ fps that I did have. The opening screen (with the flying dragon) ran flawless before the upgrade, but It's so bad now I can barely log into the game.

Not only that, Firefox scrolling is incredibly sluggish. MPlayer is a bit sluggish as well, but at least usable.

My system:

Linux 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.x86_64
Intel Core2 Duo 6400
GeForce 8500 GT (1 gig ram)
nvidia 180.29 driver

I've checked the Xorg.0.log, dmesg, and /var/log/messages. There are no errors. I've tried just about every X config option, and pci=nommconf. I've looked into every service running, but I notice nothing taking much CPU except the X server, which can jump to 50% or more CPU usage.

Any ideas? I can provide xorg.conf, etc. just let me know.