If your lag meter is fine, but you're getting pauses like this, it points to
your PC config.
A few things to try:

1. Do you have a resident virus checker and what are its settings? Or do you
have some other kind of scheduled CPU/disk/memory hog?
2. Do you have IPX drivers installed? I used to get a bad pausing problem in
all games. It went away when I uninstalled the IPX drivers (I didn't really
need them and you probably don't unless you run on an old Netware network).
3. Before you run EQ, reboot and clear your taskbar of resident stuff.