1 second "Play / Pause" lag - please help me!!

Question

Hi all, in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects and Soundbooth for that matter, whenever I press "play" on the timeline, there is a 1 second pause/lag before the footage starts playing.
For editing, this is a nightmare, obviously you want precision when you edit and i have no idea what is causing this on these products.. please help if you can.
Imagine if when you are typing a reply, there's a one second lag between when you press a key on the keyboard and when it gets shown on the monitor, that's what it feels like right now.
When I press spacebar again to STOP, it STOPS just like normal. There is no lag. However - when I press spacebar again to start it playing, everytime, a one-second pause.
I have installed Sony Vegas, there is no play/pause lag at all. so it MUST be a setting or tweak within Adobe Premiere that can fix this.. please..!
My settings are well over requirements, I also wondered if it was "pre-roll", but changing that and "post-roll" to 0.00 seconds from 2.00 seconds did nothing. still the lag.
i also pushed DirectX sound acceleration from FULL to Standard, did nothing. still lag.
So here are my specs:
Intel Quad Core, 4x 3.2ghz,
2gb DDR2 RAM,
768mb 8800 GTX,
500gb 7200rpm hard drive,
Windows XP Professional SP2,
please help me if you have an answer.. is there a simple play setting i'm missing? some sort of hidden buffer i need to set to 0 instead of 1?
it must be something within Adobe, because Vegas' timeline plays with no lag or pause at all.. but I NEED my Premiere Pro..!
thank you so much for your help
jay

Answer 1

I have just discovered a solution that seems to remedy this problem on my system. Though it is likely very specific to my configuration, I thought I'd pass along what I found. Perhaps it will be of direct help to someone and/or spark a thought about what the actual underlying cause might be.
I have Computer Associates CA Anti-Virus on this system. This program has a feature that lets you put real-time virus scanning to "sleep" for up to 999 minutes. If I put CA Anti-Virus to sleep, and then launch Premiere Pro CS3, the project loads much faster and all the playback pauses/delays disappear. So, putting CA to sleep is now part of my routine before launching Premiere Pro CS3. When I do this, the program is usable.
Interestingly, during the project loading delay and during the playback delays, there was absolutely no disk activity on any drive, and Task Manager showed that Premiere Pro CS3 was taking 100% of the CPU. The CA Anti-Virus services are running but effectively show 0% CPU time. So whatever is happening (in-memory scanning of the loaded files, perhaps?) is being fully charged to Premiere and not to the antivirus scanner.
Also, it's interesting to note that the exact same antivirus software in its fully-enabled (non-sleepy) state has no such effect on either Premiere Pro 1.5 or Premiere 6.0 on the exact same system. When antivirus is fully enabled (not asleep), neither of these older Premieres have any delays in loading or playing back.
Based on what I have read in the forums, it sounds like there are likely multiple issues that lead to these delay problems. In any case, the behavior is a pretty serious regression in Premiere, and Adobe should add this scenario to their regressions testing suite.