Video playback tends to require more accurate timers in order to achieve smoothness but nothing should be altered unless a background via Deskscapes is being played.

Couple of questions.

1) Which version of DeskScapes is this?

2) If you sign out and back in again does the problem continue?

So I'm less sure it's DeskScapes.  But it's still something Stardock.  Here's why.

When I ran powercfg -energy, Windows pointed a finger at Explorer, DeskScapes, Groupy...  In fact, it blamed Rainmeter too (for lowering the platform timer resolution).

I removed DeskScapes and WindowBlinds.

Windows no longer said anything about Groupy.  Or Rainmeter.

Stripped of WindowBlinds, the platform timer resolution stays where Windows wants it.  I suspect that anything which interacts with Explorer is then hooked into WindowBlind's desire to lower the timer resolution even if that application doesn't do so on its own.

Now, I understand WindowBlinds is a UI customizer, so there may be valid reasons for it to insist on hammering the CPU.  But for my laptop, which I bought for the allegedly epic battery life, I settled for a different way of getting transparency back that doesn't show up on Windows energy reports.