Okay, my machine is a Athlon 2000+, with 512 meg of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce FX 5200, and I'm running Windows XP Pro. In the CS, after working on a mod and saving, when i try and exit (via 'File' - 'Exit') nothing happens (very literally), the mouse and keyboard are pretty much the only things that will do much. The machine thinking, I can tell becuase it's making more noise htan usual. After a minute or so of this, I press Ctrl - Alt - Del to see whats going on. It says the CS is using 100% of the CPUs processing, this may be just me but that seems to be a bad thing, it also says the CS is 'Not Responding'. At this point my computer is moving like a snail through super-glue, it takes a long time for me to get any respnse whatsoever from it. I then try to 'End Task' the CS (getting this question after double-clicking takes a good 45 seconds), when it comes up i tell it to 'end task', hte menu dissappears and nothing happens. I repeat the 'end task' process again, get fed up and go to get a coke. 3 minutes later it's almost done closing the CS, and eventually it does, but it takes much more time than it should.

And now, Morrowind itself. I've gotten used to the fact that even some of the most 1337 machinery out there won't run Morrowind perfectly, but I'vee had some issues. My computer used to have an Athlon 1700+ and a GeForce 3, I then upgraded to the previously mentioned Athon 2000+ and GeForce FX. One would suspect performance to go up, but it didn't. The game decided to be unique and it's performance went down. It loads slower, its alot choppier (lower frame rates), i've had to set the graphics down nad the veiwing distance down in-game, and it takes forevere to close out of the game. At one point I 'alt-tab'-ed out and pressed 'ctrl - alt - del' to find the game was chewing up 100% of the CPU (like the CS does). I pretty sure thats not a good thing (like I said brefore.)

Pretty soon I'm probably jsut going to back-up my files, uninstall all the useless crap on my computer, uninstall Morrowind, run SpyBot, defrag, run SpyBot (for good times sake), and maybe defrag again. And if all else fails I'll reformat (which I really don't want to do). If anybody has any suggestions, advice, or comments
please help.

Allright, here is a quick and easy tweak guide for you:

Beginner level:
1)Download AdAware, and run it.
2)Find a "registry cleaner" or "wincleaner", or some other utility that cleans out the clutter in your registry.
3)Turn off your virus scanner (if you have one) while playing. Huge boost there.
4)Turn off your firewall (if you have one) while playing if you aren't on the internet. If you have a router, uninstall your firewall (seriously, your router already has a built-in firewall).
5) you already know this, but you should also defragment your hard drives after moving/installing/deleting a large quantity of files, or once a month.

Intermediate level:
1)Follow the following tuturial from this hyperlink. If you're using windowsXP/win2000, there's a TON of services running in the background that you DONT NEED. This guide gives recommendations and explanations as to which ones you should turn off or put on standby mode.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm
2)Go to Start->controlpanel->system. Click on the advanced tab. Then under performance, click settings. Under visual effects, deselect as many visual effects as desirable (or just click on the "best performance" radio button). You know those gloppy new fancyshmancy round buttons that windows xp has for the menus and start menu? Turning off the windows XP theme can recover about *40 megs of RAM*. Personnally, I customized WindowsXP to look *exactly* like windows2000, and boy did it run faster!
3)Go to Start->controlpanel->system. Click on the advanced tab. Then under performance, click settings. Click the advanced tab. Under processor scheduling, click "programs". This will optimize windows to run single programs, like morrowind. Do the same for memory usage.

Advanced level:
*warning, tinkering with this stuff might be a problem, so be sure to educate yourself before doing any of these things*
1)If you're running windows XP, be sure to have either TWO hard drives running, or TWO partitions running. Make the first harddrive/partition NTFS, and the second harddrive/partition FAT32, with a 16K or 32K or even larger cluster size. On the NTFS, this will be where windows and important applications and data are stored. On the FAT32, this will be where you put all your LARGE files. Why? NTFS is more secure and more space-efficient, but FAT32 is much faster (but hogs more space). Depending on which game you install, you might want to install it on NTFS for safety and to save space, or install it on FAT32 for performance and if it has LARGE data files. You can either get a program like "partition magic" or "partition commander" or use windows2000/XP's built-in partitioning programs to help in making partitions if you're very brave.
2) (THIS STEP REQUIRES STEP 1) Go to Start->controlpanel->system. Click on the advanced tab. Then under performance, click settings. Click the advanced tab. Under virtual memory, click "change". By default, windows will assign the page file to the first partition/hard drive it sees, which can be bad since windows is installed on this same partition. You want to move the page file to another hard drive or your FAT32 partition to increase performance (no matter how much RAM you have). First, you NEVER want to have the "System managed size" radio button selected. Windows will keep on changing the page file size which makes it super-defragmented, and therefore very slow. Now be *very careful* on what you do here. You first want to change the pagefile max/min size on your first drive letter to 2MB (don't click "no paging file": you need a minimum of 2MB to store the windows registry and other important stuff). Then on your SECOND partition/hard drive (which should be FAT32), set the page file MAX AND MIN size to TWO TIMES YOUR AMOUNT OF RAM (if you have 512 megs of ram, you want 1024 megs of pagefile). Make sure you lick "set" after each time you reset the page file size. Click okay so you can reboot windows.
3) It isn't quite over yet folks! You then should download a "pagefile defragmenter" program. This runs windows defragmenter on your registry files and page files before windows completely boots up. It will attempt to consolidate your page file into one long piece near the beginning of the drive. This is VERY important. A fragmented page file is *very slow*.
you can get this program at:
www.sysinternals.com

***
NOTE: you can run step three even if you haven't done *any* of the previous steps. Even if your pagefile is on the same partition as your windows installation, you will still get a benefit by defragmenting it, and defragmenting the windows registry file.

I think this is one of the most concise windows tweak guides you'll find. Enjoy.