hmmm perhaps this is related to your av app ? this issue cropped up recently with someone else, and was related to the anti-virus proggy scanning the pk4's as they were accessed (thread over on q4max forums here ) I never realised before, but it appears that theres already documented issues with th...

Edit: posted twice in error.

I forgot to post HD specs.

I have a 160GB Seagate SATA HD... It's partitioned 3 times, and all my games are on a 40GB partition.

The disk is fine, everything runs perfectly on it, so it can't be that. And HL2 is on the same partition as Quake4, and it runs great...

I really don't understand this... Quake 4 and Prey take literally 5+ minutes to load up, yet Half-Life 2 and other games only take under a minute. wtf? My main question is - to actually LOAD a game, doesn't that just depend on CPU speed?? Maybe I'm wrong... I know I have a sh*tty graphics card, but ...