Question Question - anyone know what is going on? - weird behavior.

You'll need to provide a lot more details like your computer specs, your headset, what menu do you mean, do you have other stuff running besides VAM, etc

Hi Atani, thank you for the fast reply.
OK, my system :-
MSI Laptop
Processor - Intel core i7-11800H @ 2.30 GHz 11th Gen
RAM - 16 GB
Graphic Card - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 laptop GPU with 6GB memory
Headset - Oculus Quest 2 (through the machines only USB c port)
For desktop I use a HDMI cable to a larger screen
My mouse is a Ravit wired mouse and I connect it and my keyboard through a USB hub
As far as I know theres nothing else running, apart from windows background tasks.
My VAM sits on an external SCSI 4TB Seagate Drive.

The menu in question is the base menu, the thing you see when you first enter VAM, the one with the four panels Hub, Scene browser, Create, and VAMX

While your PC will be limited in several points regarding VR use, there's nothing there that is dramatic enough to explain the behaviour you describe.
The mouse wiggle leads me to think you're on a power saving mode, especially considering it's a laptop, so do check if that's the case.
I have no experience with SCSI connected drives to connect it to the problem mentioned, but assuming the drive itself is a platter HDD that will make any loading in VAM much slower than with a SSD too.

Thanks for the quick replay again. The thing that makes me suspect some setting on my PC is that this wasnt happening a few months ago, or at least the initial low FPS was not happening, and nothing has changed except my VAM folders have got bigger. I think its got something to do with my system lagging and struggling to keep up with VAMs demands, I get a lot of 'white' hourglass time in the middle of loading things or when I open a menu during a scene, or do something in timeline, I accept my system is limitted its just the involvement of the mouse that confuses me.
Thanks again.

Get a new clean VAM copy and try that one in VR to see if the same problem shows up.

Just thought I'd update you on this in the hope it might be helpful to other people with the same issue. You were right, it is due to something 'sleeping' and being awoken by the mouse wiggle. It is not actually sleeping as such but it appears to be switching from the Nvidia gpu to the onboard graphics after a certain level of inaction on the VR front. There is a setting in the Nvidia settings "Power Management Mode" which you can set for all apps or individual apps, this can be set to to Prefer maximum performance which should prevent it flipping to integrated graphics to save battery, however it is not the whole story, because I have everything set to use the GPU preferentially and Prefer maximum performance and it still happens though not as much. Something else is at work. Its more lag now than low fps. It will lag, the white hour glass suddenly appearing and nothing happening halfway through a load or during a timeline animation, and wiggling the mouse again seems to help. I think most people will not experience this you would need to have a limited system, be using a laptop (PCs don't typically need battery saving methods) and if you are using an Oculus you may find the fps reduction again. During a long load (sometimes 5-10 minutes for VAM or even some scenes) you typically remove the headset and go do something else for a few minutes, the Oculus detects its not on a face and sleeps, charging the battery through the usb and then when you put the headset back on and it wakes back up, you will usually see the low fps that can be corrected by the mouse wiggle. It is not a problem with VAM, it's more a windows/nvidia possibly/oculus thing.