I seem to have finally figured out what's going on. It appears that windows was being too idle sensitive, not to dosbox, but to the games it was running. Setting the idle sensitivity to low on the original game fixed the problem.

I double checked my drives and they are running in DMA, not PIO. Changing the draw method made it happen less often but it still happens.

I've done a lot of board searching and haven't found an answer to this so here we go.... I've tried a few games with DosBox and I get the same result with all of them. The game will start but within a few seconds the video only will pause. Sound keeps playing. DosBox itself is not paused. The weird …