Sometime early yesterday...I noticed that when I move my mouse around the screen it would sometimes stop, as if the computer was doing something in the background and then would continue.

At first I thought it was nothing but now it's gotten worse and worse. This is what I've tried so far:
1) I've uninstalled and reinstalled standard mouse drivers.
2) Uninstalled a few programs I installed recently (Just to be safe)
3) Reinstalled video drivers (I did this because the mouse is also creating a ghosting effect on my desktop. If I move it around, an outline of an icon or tool tip will pop-up and then vanish. This happenes almost all the time.)
4) I've tried different background images/no background image.

This problem is making it almost imposible to play any games that reqire the mouse because with it freezes in the game (Half-Life) it freezes the game up. And it also really hurts general operation of the system. Oh yeah, I also checked out my programs and processes and nothing new has popped-up in the last few days.

Now, my setup:
Win2k (No SP's yet)
256 MB RAM
700 MHz Duron
30 GB hard drive (25 GB free)
NVIDIA TNT2 Video card (32 MB)
Onboard sound and NIC
Standard keyboard and Optical MS mouse
And I just reinstalled Win2k on NTFS about a month ago.

Any ideas?