Absolutely horrible stuttering in game

[Whacker]

Friends, I'm in need of help again.

Recently acquired two new toys, CH Products USB rudder pedals, and a Track IR 5 + pro clip. Flying in IL-2 is the most fun I've had in a long time.... if it weren't for this persistent, awful stuttering.

Firstly, I want to say it was happening some prior to getting both of those new toys, but not nearly as bad as it is now.

The stuttering is more of a pausing effect. The game will work fine, then freeze for roughly a second, then resume. It's intermittent, I haven't been able to associate it with anything in game. It's also happening across ALL of my installed versions. I have separate installs for 4.10.1 (stock, HSFX 5.01, Ultrapack 3 RC4, and DBW 1.71), and 4.11 hotfix 1. It happens in all versions of the game, with and without mods to enable 6DoF.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, Intel 2600k, 16gb ram, ATI 6970 video card. My hard drive is nicely defragged and optimized. Windows is stable, I do not experience any of this stuttering in other games installed. Found a thread suggesting it might be MSI Afterburner, which I turned off and it had zero impact. Am running Catalyst 12.3 latest drivers. Have tried copying over the atioglxx.dll file into my game folder and telling conf.ini to use that, it doesn't work and the game refuses to even launch with that enabled. I've tried forcing absolute bone stock/fastest settings in a Catalyst exe profile for the game, forcing AA, AF, triple buffering and the like off. No effect. All of my installs are recently done and clean. Turning Track IR software off and unplugging all of the Track IR devices doesn't affect it at all either.

I'm at a loss. Any ideas?

Edit - I'm running the latest version of Track IR software, 5.1.3. I've tried turning off my antivirus which is Symantec, no effect. This is really bumming me out.