ML> however, you may also be talking about seeing "jerking" or
 ML> "hesitation" on the _screen_ and that would likely be
from background
 ML> processing going on elsewhere in the machine...

 JP>         More like hesitation here, |\/|ark. The system just hung  
 JP> for a split second, noticeable only to a trained eye. All else  
 JP> was fine in this DOS environment.

yes, that is normal on many machines with background processing going on...
i know of no way to tell what it was that caused the hesitation, though...
at least not without very detailed system process logs and noting the time
and date that the hesitation occured...

i see something similar on my OS/2 box, at times... i've traced it, in most
cases, to swapfile management (growing or shrinking the swapfile) or to a
PHP process that the web server is running at that time... that's about as
close as i can get in my situation... my other systems do not have
everything needed for me to tell...

)\/(ark