key ahead delay with Dell laptop

i'm new at this so bear with me. i have a new dell laptop inspiron 1520 running windows XP (not vista). I've added nothing to the laptop and it is running just the preloaded programs which include word, excel, powerpoint and standard programs supplied with the laptop. i've noticed that when i create an email using outlook express or prepare something in Word, i encounter "key ahead" situations. by that i mean that normally, when i am typing, each letter shows up immediately as i enter a key stroke...then i notice that they keystrokes are not being registered as i am keying and the display has to "catch up" to those keystrokes i have entered. this drives me crazy. this never happens with my desktop and does not happen with my office laptop which happens to be a dell laptop as well. can anyone tell me what is causing this to happen and how i can eliminate the problem. i contacted dell's online help and they were "of no help at all". their one solution caused me to lose all internet connections and i had to reverse the changes they suggested----basically, they had no idea what to do and i finally gave up on them. hopefully someone out there can steer me to the right solution.............

 

New or not - Malware travels fast these days. Update and run all your security software. Visit at least 2 online scanners - full scans every time. This here is Kasperskys. And this here is ESET NOD32. Perhaps you should get yourself a malware check here on Majorgeeks as well. You see, key-loggers can cause this behavior.

 

i've done a full scan with norton 360 and nothing was found. what other scanning programs would you suggest i run?? if that is not the cause of the problem, what setting influence the key ahead functionality??? thanks