It's been a little bit since all this went down, but I figured I'd let you know what I found out since then, in case someone else runs into a similar problem..
One, I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit. I don't think that really had anything to do with it, though. What I think fixed it was that, when getting the system upgrade, I threw in a pretty old motherboard to support the better processor (yeah, sounds stupid). I initially got all these upgrades for one purpose; Battlefield 3! Installing Battlefield 3, I realized that this too ran like shit. After long hours of trial-and-error processes, my friend and I finally realized what was causing everything to run like garbage…
I needed a BIOS update.. Now, I'm back playing on my regular system and it's running perfect!
[As a side note. Oblivion also ran like complete crap on my system. The BIOS update fixed that, as well.]