responsive threading

I'm developing a graphics application, that I want to be very 
responsive, very smooth, all the time! The rendering is pretty simple, 
the framerate is high and stable, so I just lock to vsync, and 
everything moves beautifully smooth! The CPU usage for this thread is 
always below 10%.

However, I also have another thread, that has to do some heavy work. 
This thread does tons of IO operations, and also makes the CPU sweat!

There is no synchronization between the two threads, so they should be 
able to run independently. Still, I'm experienceing sudden spikes in the 
framerate, when the second thread is really hammering. What could be the 
reason for this? Is it possible to do something about it, to regain the 
continuous framerate? I'm really not interested in the performance of 
the second thread, I just want my first thread to run as smooth as 
possible! I've tried lowering the priority for the second thread, and it 
does help, but there are still some spikes. Is it possible that it's 
Windows itself doing some operations at higher priority, like memory 
management, IO stuff, and the likes?

Thanks,


Andras


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