Reducing Windows Background Processes

Question

I'm in charge of my company's data acquisition system and we've finally got everything running about how we want it to.  The last issue we're having is that whenever the screen updates the program slows down measureably.  I've got the program running in a loop that collects data, processes data, waits for user input, sends out commands to other hardware, and then repeats.  The program is configured to only display one data point (64 channels, plus 5 on a chart and three other numeric gauge indicators) of every 100 collected.  The effect this has is that while the program is not displaying data the loop executes in about 2-3ms, but that time jumps to ~60ms when it has to update the front panel.
My question is: how can improve the performance of my code on a windows XP system?
Is there some kind of indicator that I should use over another kind?
Does anyone have a guide on how to disable windows background processes (the computer the DAQ system is on isn't running much, but I'm not a very advanced user in that area)?
Any other general tips and tricks for this kind of problem?
I know the best solution would be to move to a real time operating system, but that just isn't an option right now.  Any suggestions on how to improve performance on the system I've got would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Some clarifications, as requested.  We're acquiring 32 analog channels and 32 thermocouple channels.  The gauges and chart indicators are just a way of displaying a subset of the data in a more obvious form.  All channels are also displayed in numeric indicators.  The program is set up to run a loop with the following DAQ scheme: calculate a timestamp (relative to the start of the program), acquire a single scan of the analog channels, acquire a single scan of the thermocouple channels, and then do other data processing tasks.  There's no set data rate, we're trying to acquire the data as fast as the program will allow, so the 2-3ms loop times is what we see in the output data file.  One data point will occur at time 0.003, and then next would get the timestamp 0.006. 
Every time the screen is updated, in the post-processing part, the time to execute the whole loop increases dramatically.  In the data file we'd see a point recorded at time 0.006, and then the next one would be at time 0.066 (something to that effect).  Since screen updating seems to be the cause of the slowdown I'm interested in what I can do to get that part to run as fast as possible.
We're running LabVIEW 7.1, and to get the screen to only update occasionally I have it set to keep a counter going that is incremented each time through the loop.  If the counter gets to the value of 100, then in post-processing the current batch of data is sent to the front panel indicators and the counter is reset to 0.  For all other counter values the data just goes into the output file and the screen indicators are left alone.