mysterious frame rate drop

I've been stuck on this performance drop for 3 days, put my best engineer on it, then I had the best engineer I know in L.A. look at it for several hours. We all gave up.

This happens specifically when you grab a ball from the character in the game, then drop by the ball, and the spike is triggered about %10 of the time.

We thought it was scripting initially, but after digging through every line of code, turning almost everything in the game off we could, and examing the profiler in depth, we're still getting the performance hitch.

Somebody help.... please.