I am having fairly regular crashes on my machine. I have a decent amount of RAM (2Gb) but I also have a lot of applications open. The crash is usually caused by either firefox.exe wlmail.exe paintdotnet.exe I cannot be sure it's those applications directly, it might be a by product of other applications running at the same time but it is always one of these that runs the CPU up to 100%. Now, when I go to the task manager and the program, everything is okay for about 10 seconds until I click on something else on the desktop or window. Suddenly explorer or crashdump.exe comes to the top of the list hogging 100% Any ideas on how to debug this?

Burn / boot off this. http://www.memtest86.com/ Let it do a couple passes, bad memory will produce symptoms similar to a virus (corrupt files causing instability).

Right...no memory errors on 2 passes. I don't think it's a memory issue but I'll run it overnight so it can 10 passes or so just in case. What I can say is that the crashing application is ALWAYS an internet connected application. Of the applications that crash it's always when I'm either saving a file to an FTP folder, accessing data, just opened a new tab in FF, or maybe mail being checked periodically. The application that always runs the CPU up to 99% first is wlmail.exe dealbook.exe firefox.exe When these are killed using task manager, explorer.exe then runs it up to 99% and I have to power off. This makes me think it's something like svchost or something else handling incoming data but I'm not sure how I could track this as the windows utilities or bug reports probably wouldn't have logged any information about the crash because the CPU runs so high that the system becomes sluggish and I have to power off to restart. Any ideas on some utilities to use?

anyone know of some monitoring tools?

anyone?

Found out what it was, it was Windows Live Mail so I have uninstalled it and installed Thunderbird instead.