GPU desktop perfomance problem

I am developing an interactiv, fullscreen, AIR application with stage3D and running into a strange performance issue.

Visually the application consists of a few  floating texts that need to animate very smoothly/slowly/organically, instead they are stuttering.

I have tried the application on a variey of machines (i5, i7 ... 3400mHz, solid disk, 16gb ram, etc… …windows7) and several good cards (nvidia quadro k4000 and AMD firepro w7000), variety of configurations - the results are always bad.

The very odd thing I discovered by pure chance is this:

if I run chrome browser(32 bit) in the background, the app performs perfectly...even on an average machine.

Obviously I am doing something wrong, but searching all over the place, I cannot drum up a clue. Simply leaving chrome running in the background is not a viable solution in this situation. Can anyoine point me in the right direction or has had a similiar situation. Would be very grateful.