HD4870x2 Alt-Tab delays please help

hey guys and girls,

I'm having problems with my two HD4870x2 in crossfireX . Everytime I Alt-Tab out and then Alt-Tab back in games it takes about 3 seconds for the picture to come up. The sound is instant but I get a black screen for a good 3 secs before the game pops up. I have no other programs running in the background while this is happening and ive updated to the latest drivers. I dont know what else to do its very annoying almost to the point where I wanna sell these cards. Ive test it with just one card and the same thing occurs.

specs:
Pentium Core2 Duo E8500
Gigabyte EP45-DS3R
2x HD4870x2's in CrossfireX
4gig DDR800
W.D. SATA 500g HD
thermaltake 1200watt PSU
Viewsonic 28" monitor 1920x1200

Really annoying seeing as I brought this set up to play high end games but all I play now is Wow definately not a high end game as far as visuals go so you'd think I'd Alt-Tab back in rather quick. I use to run two 8800GTS 512m and that was fine, use to alt tab back and forth without a problem at all.

any help would be awsome
thank you

thanks for the reply one-shot. I thought Gigabyte EP45-DS3R ran Xfire at 16/16 must have made a big error in my research prior of purchase. I dont know if the HD is causing the problem because i had the same set up but different mobo and cards and everything was fine.

the 3 second pause alt-tabbing between games is normal...

Depending on the game my PC will take a few more seconds to load it back from Alt Tab. I play HL2 with the Cinematic Mod 8 and they recommend 4Gb of RAM and a 64bit OS. I couldn't run it on 32bit XP with the graphics up or it would constantly crash. Games like that take a few more seconds to load up for me. Older games, like BF2 or COD4 Mulitplayer, load up in a second when I'm switching between programs.