explorer.exe eating idle processor time

[adurity]

Hey all,

I'm having a problem where occasionally, and in no regular intervals, my processor time will be eaten up by both the explorer.exe and svchost.exe background tasks. It does consume 100% of the processor, but usually fluxuates between 25% and 75% creating something that looks like and ECG (see picture) when you look at the usage history in Task Manager. This problem is really quite frustrating as it seriously degrades system performance when it occurs and there is no apparent reason for it to be occuring.

I'm almost certain I don't have a virus, I run virus scans regularly with the latest updates. I have multiple firewalls in place, including the windows firewall. I'm running SP2. Are there any hints or suggestions you all can give me as to where to turn for a solution to this problem? Has anyone ever heard of this before?

Here are my system specs (in detail)

ASUS A7V333 Motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 2100

512 MB RAM

two 120gb IBM hard drives

Sony DVD writer

Plextor CD writer

Audigy

Matrox Parhelia 128MB graphics card

Bluetooth mouse and keyboard

USB devices galore

Advice, anyone?

Thanks,

Adam

[buletov]

how about spyware? mailware? adware...

try googling for spybot or adaware

[N1K]

If you sure it's not a virus can you tell us when this happens, what apps do u use?

As I recall there was one virus which copied another svchost.exe process and maked a processor bottleneck...but I can't remember which one...

[adurity]

I've got adaware, I've run it, it comes up with some cookies, but that's it. I quarantine and delete them.

Like I said before, there doesn't seem to be any correlation to time of day, or applications running, or any such thing like that. It just starts, goes on for a while, then stops as suddenly as it started. Sometimes I will leave my computer for a few hours, after it's been running fine, and come back to find that the problem has started. Then I'll get frustrated and leave for another few hours and the problem will have stopped.

It's not mission-critical that I solve the problem, as I plan to get a bunch of new hardware and rebuild my computer from the ground up, thereby starting with a fresh windows build. I was just wondering if there was a solution in the interim that would stop this annoyance. It has put my windows knowledge to the test, I've tried everything from optimizing startup, etc. to registry cleaning. Nothing...

Let me know what you all think.

-Adam

[CoffeeFiend]

Could be just about anything. I'd perhaps see what processes are running, check the HKLM/HKCU \...\ Run entries, run a good AV/spyware scanner, and if that doesn't solve it, then I see no point of wasting more time than that on it when you can have a freshly reinstalled system that works fine in no time at all.

[oftentired]

These services will run in the background and use a noticable percentage of CPU cycles. In some cases they deliberately wait for idle system time.

Automatic Update

DHCP client

Indexing Service

Performance Logs and Alerts Service

System Restore Service

Volume Shadow Copy Service (dependent upon settings)

I may have missed some and perhaps some of these listed are not terribly high in CPU percentage use.

[N1K]

Check your computer with Sasser removal tool, just in case...

[chezy666]

Keep ypur antivirus updated and run a scan.

[ejfadrigo]

Try to change your memory

[aresgodofwar]

well by the pic you attached, i'd say your computer has a healthy heartbeat. lol.

but seriously, if it were me, i'd try ending explorer, then restart it.