I'm working on my friend's laptop. It had a few viruses and lots of spyware, which I removed. Now when I run a scan with AVG Anti-Virus and Ad-aware, both with current definition files, the laptop comes up clean. But the problem is when I open IE, it sits there using 100% CPU and IE is unusable. The icon in the very top-left corner of the window is the standard application icon as opposed to the actual IE icon. Then I'm forced to just terminate IE. I tried opening IE in Safe Mode and it worked just fine, so I looked at what services were and weren't running in Safe Mode. Then I booted in regular mode and ended all the services except for the ones that were running while in Safe Mode, then I tried opening IE and it still used 100% CPU. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Does it do this under all profiles, or just the one your friend uses to login? If it's just that one profile, rename it to profilename.old and then have your friend log back in. A new profile will be created. If data was stored under that old profile, you'll need to login as Admin and move it. Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

You can D/L winpatrol and it will let you see what is running on your PC in your start-up and you can disable or remove entries. Also you may try an sfc /scannow and if that doesn't work, an XP repair install. You'll need your XP CD for those. You have nothing to lose by trying those. After the repair install, you'll have to redo your critical updates. Hopefully my advice will help you...Please post back with your results....thanks

I made a new account and used that to log in and it worked perfectly! Seriously, I tried pretty much everything I could think of. I'm not sure why I didn't think about making a new account. Thanks for your help! I'm the kind of person that likes to know why something worked, so could you please expain what could've been wrong with the old account? Thanks!

No one (not even the Redmont Wizards) could explain what went wrong with the old account other than it somehow got corrupted. No one (not even Uncles Billy & Steve) really knows Windows - it's really one strange and highly complexed animal with hundreds of millions of codes interwined. i_XpUser

Jus one of dem thangs. :) Life is more painless for those who are brainless.