Oof! Such bitterness..
Yeah I did experience the problem of AE seeing the virtual hyper-threading cores as real cores but managed to turn off HT with the Xcode thing or whatever it is.
I must say I’m having more luck rendering to image sequences, as I read somewhere that 3/4 processors all adding sequential frames to a 2 gig quicktime file means ridiculous overheads which would explain some of the disk access.
Trouble is that you then have to reimport that sequence and render out a movie file so there’s not much saving on time there.
I guess we are in a transition time between OSes and applications. Fingers crossed CS5 sorts it out. I might try CS4 on my boot camped Windows 7 and see if there’s any difference.