Computer not becoming idle

[Achtung]

For some reason, my computer never becomes idle after I leave it untouched for a while. The screensaver does not come on (set to 5 minutes), and AIM does not report me as idle either, even though I have to option checked to let me be seen as idle. It's a minor annoyance, but it keeps bothering me. I thought a it would based idle status on user input, but apparently not. Is there some background program that might be running to cause this? I'm on Win XP, 256 MB RAM, PII 450.

Thanks.

 

[Utterman]

Well go to the Windows Task manager by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and goto the processes tab to see what is running. Look at programs that are using a lot of CPU resources and decide if you need them or not.

 

[Achtung]

Yeah, looks like nothing is using more than about 2% of the CPU when I'm not doing anything. There will be an occasional spike, but not much else.

 

[Achtung]

One last bump, in case anyone has any ideas. Thanks.

 

[Flashram]

Make sure you have speech recognition disabled in XP (Language Bar I think). I had some major problems because my damn microphone was picking up sounds and the speech recognition was going nuts. My cpu would spike around 90% sometimes for no reason until I figured it out.