I have a IBM Think Pad My friend was trying to connect my laptop to his LAN through my GIGAFAST wireless PCMCIA adapter. He was not successful with the wireless – so finally connected through an Ethernet card. It worked fine when it was connected that way. Since then, however, now that I am running with no internet connection (just trying to use local applications) the system has become incredibly slow – even after re-booting. Task manager shows zero tasks, while running at 100 CPU usage and about 24 processes open. We tried running in safe mode and system runs faster. There must be something running and we don’t know what. When trying to run error checking on the c drive - in safe mode - we get this message “ the disk check could not be performed because exclusive access to the drive could not be obtained” This may sound like a virus, but it was working fine before and the only connection that occurred was through a relatively secure network. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Hit control-alt-delete and select the Processes tab. Look under the CPU column and you can determine what program is tying up your CPU resources. The System Idle Process is just available CPU and so under normal idle circumstances this number can be around 99 or a little less.

I had the same problem, and like you I was convinced it wasn't a virus because I had just installed Windows fresh. However, during the Windows install I was being attacked and I only found that out by re-installing again with my cable unplugged, then installed Norton firewall before plugging back in. Check if the process hogging the CPU is svchost.exe - if so it is the same problem that I had and that is how I fixed it.

CPU at 100% was drving mad. I had just fixed viruses on a friend's computer, got the AVG database up to date and the machine running sweetly and it then ran like a dog. Scans showed no virus. I ran spybot and found systems.exe running as a Windows startup. I disabled the registry keys within Spybot but it kept rewriting them. My laptop (also XP) does not have this file and the date modified in the Windows/system32 dir for this file was yesterday. I renamed the extension - in case I screwed up I could go through a F8 safe boot to command prompt and named it back. CPU is back to under 10%.