explorer.exe eating CPU

[lumbus]

I have an AMD X2 4200+, ASUS A8N-E nForce4, 2 GB memory, Win XP Pro. Sometimes explorer.exe goes nuts and consumes 50% constantly (100% of one core) while doing NOTHING. When it doesn't do that, it seems to constantly use more than it should, jumping up and down between 2 and 10 percent while doing NOTHING (see screenshot).

Task manager

Today I was "ejecting" a USB card reader and noticed that the cursor over the "Safely eject hardware" dialog was changing back and forth between normal cursor and wait cursor constantly, at about the same rate as the CPU consumption is spiking (see screenshot). The devices that the dialog was listing were my three SATA drives, of which the two 320 GB ones are in a mirroring RAID array.

Safely eject hardware

Anyone have any suggestions (besides reinstalling Windows, I don't have time!)? Please help!

 

[Heckler 5th]

could you please post a screenshot of TASK MANAGER / PROCESSES in addition to TASK MANAGER / PERFORMANCE?

i would suggest running spybot search & destroy and/or lavasoft adaware to get rid of spyware that could be using up your resources.

 

[lumbus]

Originally posted by: Heckler 5th
could you please post a screenshot of TASK MANAGER / PROCESSES in addition to TASK MANAGER / PERFORMANCE?

i would suggest running spybot search & destroy and/or lavasoft adaware to get rid of spyware that could be using up your resources.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've already run the cleaning programs. I've also tried killing everything except the Windows processes and it still does it.

 

[ValuedCustomer]

Originally posted by: lumbus

Originally posted by: Heckler 5th
could you please post a screenshot of TASK MANAGER / PROCESSES in addition to TASK MANAGER / PERFORMANCE?

i would suggest running spybot search & destroy and/or lavasoft adaware to get rid of spyware that could be using up your resources.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've already run the cleaning programs. I've also tried killing everything except the Windows processes and it still does it.

It's not explorer or any other Windows program that's causing the problem. Spyware can call itself anything it likes.. just because adaware, spybot, etc didn't find anything in no way means you have no spyware on your system. - do you have a way to post that screen-shot?

 

[z2akuma]

back up what you need and format, your system is pretty new so i doubt you have much on there. =p

 

[Andres3605]

Safely eject hardware, is normal with SP2 and Sata drives, try creating a new account and look at the performance

 

[gateT]

I have the same problem.What I found is when emule is running and I open the "incoming" folder explorer.exe goes to 100%,normally it will stay that way until reboot.No spyware that can be found.