It was caused by caching issues with Valve's service provider. Not actually a hack, but in many ways worth since innocent users were getting access to other's information.
While you can make educated guesses and ask online on message boards, the truth is, your bottleneck may vary between games or applications. For this reason, advice regarding which component to upgrade may not be valid for you. For example, MMORPGs tend to tax the CPU much more heavily than...
Props to you for actually typing out how you fixed it instead of just saying "I fixed it" and leaving, or just closing the thread. I hate people that do that. This way anyone else that googles their issue can solve it. I'm sure many will appreciate it.