Tony,
Generally my experience has been that if a program is sucking large amounts of CPU, other things will bog down. However, as you state, my other tasks aren't bogging down and things seem to be running fine. Lowering thread priority didn't have any real effect (other than making me feel better) in the PC's responsiveness. I haven't installed the patched version yet, FWIW and I've no complaints at all. (Compliments yes, complaints, no ).

-Zeke