Trouble using multiple video cards

Hello,

I am having trouble setting up my PC’s for multiple monitors.
They are AMD athalon with 1 Gig Ram and XP PRO

I am trying to run 5 monitors using three video cards.
1 is AGP and 2 are PCI, all of them are Nvidia Geforce 5200.
(I tried mixing in a Geforce MX400, but this was even worse.)

What happens is the PC’s become incredibly slow, for example, opening the display properties window can take 1 minute or more, any changes can also take minutes. With about four programs open, if you take the display properties window and drag it about,
It leaves ghosting trails on the displays used for charting programs such as Esignal and Tradestation.

On one of the PC’s, even after removing the extra cards and using just one card, the same sluggishness occurs, this despite the fact that that PC had no problems in the past with two cards and three monitors.

Opening task manager and performance, there is always plenty of memory left over, though on one boot the CPU performance remained at 100% until rebooted.

The monitors are 3 Samsung 17” and one 20” wide, all set to 1280 x 1024, 1 20” Samsung 1280 X 1024 and 1 Olevia 43” at 1366 x 768. All the Samsung’s and the Nvidia cards have the latest drives. The Olevia doesn’t offer drivers on it’s website and is listed as a default analog monitor.

My next step it to try using three PCI cards and eliminate the AGP. But in the past I have used 1 AGP and 1 PCI for 4 monitors with no problems, it is adding the third card (PCI) that started the trouble.

Thank you for any assistance.