Recently Photoshop has been running extremely slow on my computer. I used the System Monitor to check my processor usage and saw that it is unusually high. While my computer idles, the processor usage is at an average of 60%. I used msconfig to run as little programs as possible in the background during startup and my System Tray has only my sound and my mouse icon. Even with this done, my processor usage is still high and causes programs to run very slow. I downloaded WinTop to monitor my system more closely. Is it normal for certain programs such as Idle and KERNEL32.DLL to have multiple threads? I'm not sure if this is caused by some sort of virus... I scanned my PC w/ the Norton Antivirus that came w/ SystemWorks 2003 and no viruses were found.

That is quite abnormal. Are you sure it's kernel32.dll using all this? Unfortunately, Win98 doesn't give the nice Processes list that Win2K/XP does.

Sitting idle should not be giving you 60% CPU utilization. Something is causing that activity. You can try a couple of things: 1)Run msconfig from the Start / Run menu and check for what is being stated. Try disabling them and check your processor utilization after rebooting. Re-enable one at a time to see if you can find the culprit. 2)With an idled system - no dial-up, apps open, minimal systray items, etc) go to a DOS prompt and do a "netstat -an" command. This should give you some IP addresses for your local network and associated port #'s. Typically you may see a few open ports: i.e. 137, 138, 139 assuming file & print sharing is on, etc. 3) If you have other ports opened, then something is hooking it. For example, Zonealarm firewall will hook a port typically 1025, 1026 or 1027 - this is normal. Shutdown everything in the systray (CTRL-ALT-DEL if necessary) and check with another "netstat -an" command. 4) Try to find any culprit that may be causing the load and verify CPU utilization drops. 5) More ports will be open if you start dial-up and a browser which is normal, but sitting idle should not have a bunch of ports open. If you want to use a standalone anti-trojan detector, you can try www.pestpatrol.com or www.anti-trojan.net to detect any presence. Please remember that open ports do not mean you have a trojan, just some program has opened it. Good luck, Leo

Actually, 60% CPU usage could be normal, because of a known unfixed bug in Windows. This can also occur if you have more than one program monitoring CPU usage. If the % usage drops (to near zero) while you are moving the mouse around, then its the known bug. WINTOP should show near Idle 99% with nothing running (active). WINTOP works aroung the Windows bug that reports a high "CPU usage" number. And it is normal to have many threads running at the same time even when YOU are not doing anything.