First my system specs, Asus P3V4X System board, PIII 800 MHz 133 MHz FSB CPU, 512 MBs of PC 133 SDRAM from Crucial.com, 30 GB IBM Delta HDD 7200 RPM UDMA 100, GeForce 2 GTS pro 64 MB Video card, a free 56K modem, some sound card (long story) but it works, 10/100 NIC, running Windows 2000. My computer has been running fine, however upon booting it today a noticed something strange, using the task manager I saw that 2 programs(MStask.exe and LEXPPS.exe) are constantly using 100 percent of my CPU (50 percent each) unless another program starts running, even so any program I run is still lagging due to the loose of CPU time. I tried end process on both apps, but was told "Access is denied". Any idea what caused these 2 programs to go haywire? They are part of the Windows 2000 install so I am somewhat perplexed, the only thing I can think of is a virus, I ran fix_nimda, but it found nothing on my computer, I also scanned my C: drive with AVX Professional after updating the virus definitions, still nothing. Further more I checked my start up folders to make sure nether program was starting from there, I have no memory of ever using MStask.exe and I am not even sure what LEXPPS.exe is much less why it starts when I boot up. Any help would be great, thanks. Chris K.

Well, I'd suggest you first try installing Service Pack 2 for Windows 2000. And if you have it installed, try reinstalling it and seeing what that does. And the mstask.exe should be your taskmanager. It's not really a seperate program. As for your lexpps, I think that might be something for maybe a lexmark printer (?) it's a seperate program that is probably initiated on startup. You might also look into your Event Viewer to see if maybe you've got some errors on some of your services. Maybe start a new post with what you've tried if nobody else can help shed some light.....

Im running Win98, I believe the program is the same though, its for a Lexmark Printer, and it aggressively accesses the internet. Try removing it from your startup several different ways, it just seems to pop up again, good luck.

Allegedly, lexpps.exe is a peer to peer server Lexmark likes to install without your knowledge. It seems they like to gather data on their customers without them knowing it! It's a pretty nasty bit of software, is this legal?

Yes, LEXPPS.exe is pretty toxic but the problem with MSTask.exe is that it continues to spike to 100% even after removing LEXPPS.exe completely from the hard drive. There is a separate thread here about the problem with MSTask.exe but I haven't found a way to find exactly the thread that ramps the CPU. However, Igor Arsenin's TaskInfo2000 is a good tool for shutting down abnormal threads.