dual core affinity performace gains

[suryad]

I wonder where hyperthreading would factor in.

That is my question as well. I run XP Home on my 3.4 ghz HT enabled laptop and I read somewhere XP home does not have a multithreaded kernel unlike XP Professional. All I see is 50% of the "2" cpus being used in the Task Scheduler. Never really understood why though.