100% proccessing

#1 Thats normal
3D context stuff is normally not event based and will take all cpu time it can get.

#2 First off, i dont know what you mean by 3d context as it is a 2d enviroment.

Second, I don't see why it would get to the point of not even being able to used. I mean I litterly can't even move the mouse to a spot on the screen in under 30 seconds.

I think that it must be something a little deeper then that. But thanks anyway
-Charlie
EDIT:
I've narrowed it down to one thing.
The program runs just fine until i push the create tab

If i am on any other tab things work great. But once I'm on the create tab all things go to hell

#3 3D context as in the 2d environment is being rendered via the 3d pipelines AFAIK (ie, It's a 3d scene, 2d layers rendered on 3d surfaces all aligned to the camera or something similar)

When you switch back and forth from a direct3d (openGL) scene, I believe all the surfaces and what-have-you have to be re-created, so you'll always notice a distinct lag when you alt-tab or switch to another process

Switching between your PDF and editor is about the same as say, alt-tabbing between Half-Life 2 (or something similar) and the desktop, then back again.

On my machine this reload is fairly fast (~2 seconds) but I guess this would be determined by the speed of the graphics card

EDIT: The reason the create tab is worse, is because I guess there are a LOT of surfaces there, one for every image. And they all need to be recreated as Direct3D objects/surfaces whatever they are called (or openGl)

#4 That could explain some stuff. But it's not just a matter of switching between programs. If i am on the create tab, my mouse just lags and lags.

as long as i only stay there to grab a graphic when I need it, I guess i'll be fine.

Thanks for the help though.
Charlie

#5 Ahh I see. Well the mouse lag could be related to your graphics card. If the card is struggling a bit, then it will certainly struggle more on the create tab with all the extra widgets it has to draw

From a brief google of your graphics card, it seems it is a relatively slow one (though on a par with say ATI Raedon 9600 or GeForce FX5200 so not THAT slow)... still, I'd say the graphics card is the primary cause

#6 It's certainly not on par with those GPUs you mentioned since it still does transform and lighting, as well as vertex shaders on the CPU (aka software T&L and vertex shading), according to Intel's own description of the chip.
It's therefore not a full on GPU as the term is understood nowadays.
Now, common sense would have it that TGB not doing that much vertex processing and lighting, you wouldn't see such bad performance, but by now, we all know we shouldn't expect common sense to rule where performance is concerned :)
The speed stepping of the Celeron CPUs in laptop might be factor, data transfer between CPU and GPU, a lot of factors can be at work here

#7 Actually, I got the "on par" because the review sites I looked at used them to against compare the Intel one. In a few tests the Intel got higher FPS too... But fell behind badly in Transform and Lighting because it does it all in SW mode as you mentioned

Sort of depends on what's happening under the hood so to speak I suppose. But I'm not surprised that a 3D app is running laggy on a laptop using a Intel graphics chip :)
I can't even start TGB on this laptop, which is probably a good thing because I am supposed to be at work now and instead spend all my time reading the documentation and looking at these forums!