OT: Seeking advice - Guitar distortion plugins.

["Jesse Ray Lucas" <jlucas@neoprimitive.net>]

Can anyone recommend a plugin, or series of them, for getting a very 
gainey,
gated, guitar distortion (ala Meshuggah)?  Preferably freebie plugins, but 
I
don't care.  DirectX is my preferred API.

I had asked about hardware solutions to this previously, but am now instead
trying to get the most out of my computer (since the CPU usage meter seems
to top out at 50%, why not tax it to the max?).

-J