Well, I decided to go ahead and research it a bit. It seems the real cause is quite controversial, posts from back when multi cores started becoming available blame it on several things, from poor design choices in the softwares to OS/hardware malfunction.
Microsoft has some posts on clocking issues in multi core environments, as different cores produce different clock readings, older software would become confused/assume wrong things. This could be part of the cause.
In the end, I think it's a bummer. Also, from what I researched, it doesn't seem CPU starvation (as in completely locking out other threads/processes) is possible in XP, even though it can slow down the machine considerably.
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