So, while generating a large region, it was taking far longer than it should have been, so I popped open the good ol' Windows Task Manager and was apauled to see that the Creation Kit was using only 50% of the CPU and would not go any higher. I was doing nothing else and literally sitting here waiting for it to finish. Is this capped at 50% on purpose? Is it even capped, or is it just me? Can someone else do something taxing in the CK and see if it ever goes above 50%. I don't have the best processor (Dual core 2.7) so I would especially appreciate if the CK pulled all the processing power that it possibly could...

Can anyone confirm or deny this? I'm thinking it may be why it takes so horrendously long to load up Skyrim.esm (far longer than previous editors) and why it's so slow to render larger exterior grids. (Again, as opposed to the far faster previous kits, like the GECK)

You have a dual core processor and either a) the CK doesn't use multi-threading or b ) there are other factors that are keeping the CK bound to a single processor. It's possible that the CK is intentionally single threaded. Multi-threaded applications are more complex and thus more likely to be buggy. The majority of the time, the CK isn't doing something that is processor intensive, so they probably just went "meh".

Note, I am a CSC major, but am still in undergrad and may be wrong on this.

edit: gah, why so smiley???
a)

That makes sense... Still, I'm a little annoyed but you have a great point; I won't be doing processor intense stuff very often.