my cpu usage is unusually high. there does not appear to be anything unusual running in the background, but the cpu usage is around 60% to 80%. I have a athlon xp 1700+ running xp pro 256mb ddr ram gigabyte motherboard the system seems to run alright, but I have another system running xp and the cpu usage is around 10%. if anybody has any ideas, please let me know thanks,

Maybe some Ad-Ware running in the background?

Who really knows what it could be...we could guess all day...Go to your taskbar manager and see what process is running..I would of assumed you checked that already but u didnt mention any program that could of been running...Dallas is correct on his prediction...If u have kazaa or something running with the ad banners in the bg..that will take up alot of cpu...good luck

Hi... so i cheated out the f***** spyware funtionality of kazaa with a dummy dll called cd_clint. that dll reports to kazaa that a connection to the adware is established. i receive no banners no ads at all, but sometimes i've got a cpu usage of about 90%.....and if you take a look at the task manager it is kazaa.....! thats not really funny, but i search every week for spyware on my system, using the tool "ADAWARE" from lavasoft....my choice...... good luck Tom