Your problem is you're running Vista. 'Nuf said.
It smells like you might have a system conflict buried somewhere. I don't know what it is or how it got there, but if you *know* this is a continuing problem, try rebooting after using your chess engine. That should probably solve it, or at least make it bearable.
When playing engines (Rybka/ Fruit) on Chess Arena UCI after the opening book moves are finished it uses 100% of my CPU from then on. This leads to other applications in use becoming sluggish and slow. Is this normal, is there any way to reduce the amount of CPU the engines use? Is my Laptop good enough to run this program?
Intel(r) Core 2 CPU 2G RAM 1.73GHz 2 core- 32-bit OP system Windows Vista