[--Chris--]

*too lazy to read all replies*
some people seem to misinterpret what exactly lag is...there's a difference between lag and slow downs. if u press alt+4 u would see ur bit rate, its the amt. of information being sent to and from the server (or so i think.) when it hits 0 is when u lag, u will still move ur normal speed but everything and everyone would seem to be frozen and everyone else would see u standing still. evntually it would speed back up and you'll see everything happen like in a split second...sometimes u even get warped on walls if u attempted to go through a door on 0. now.....slowing down, this is where ur PCs processing comes in, u would slow down in areas with alot of light effects,npcs etc...reason being 1) u have a slow processor. 2)a lame video card with no ram. 3)crappy ram in general XD
while u are slowed down on ur screen people would just see u walk slowly on theirs but the walking gani would move normally on theirs cept they would see u take like 5 steps to get to one tile. all transactions of information from the server to the player and vise versa would still take place like normal (sword hits/losing hp etc)

edit: bah! i just read the replies...if running another program works then its probably a very weird bug =/ my theory is that it gets ur ram running since it will be required to run that program at the same time. oh well..thank god i got a good 2ghz processor with 2 gigs of ram XD