well, i've tried everything...I've installed and unistalled win xp in ever way possible, used different harddrives and everything, complete restores, you name it, i've done it. Now to the point. Well, there's this consistant 20-60% cpu usage shown in windows task manager which i can't get rid of. WTM says the normal 98% usage at idle, yet on the bottom bar it shows these values. Task info told me it was the interrupts time placeholder and the dpc time placeholder which were eating my cpu. The weird thing is that in safe mode, everything works fine, and these 2 processes show little cpu usage. Any suggestions, comments...please help me out.

This may apply: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;810876

did u formate ur hd

yeah, i formatted hd, i went to that page, and i'd buy it, except that the slowdown is present, I can't run videos or anything, so i don't think it's just what microsoft says.