possibly extremely odd behaviour in game?

[:1]I am a big fan of the game and have been playing it alot of late.
I have been playing online for all games and playing the original suprmme commander I understand how hardware intensive games can get with multiple 100's of units going on in game.
So when it came to sup com 2 I was happy with the performance and how it did not lag as much until late into games.
howver the odd behaviour I have noticed is while playing the game, it pauses and then continues, and can pause fairly often, thought none of it until a recent game where it took longer than usual to respond, thinking it was a possible crash I alt, ctrl, deleted out to bring up the task manager to confirm, however once the windows 7 option screen appeard the game continued, when there are a few seconds of pausing I normaly now alt, ctrl delte out and it normaly instantly fixes the issue, I have never known any game to pause until you alt ctrl delete it out and then work again.
I am running windows 7 64bit
8GB DDR3 ram
itel quad core extreme QX9650, 3Ghz
Nvidia GTX 570
2 x 1TB samsung HDD in raid 0
I didnt think it would be me as my cpu while getting old is still very powerfull, it still might not be me however its odd that it responds as soon as I alt ctr del out.