I recently noticed a severe slow down in opening apps and windows. I looked in task manager and found that the process atiptaxx.exe is using 95% of the cpu all the time. When I manually stop this process, things go back to normal. When I reboot, it is back again and the slow down is back. So now I am manually stopping it every time I boot. I believe it is used for ATI graphics stuff so I am unsure if I can stop it from loading at startup. It was not a problem in the past so maybe it's corrupt or not working properly. Does anyone know more about this or how to check if it's working properly. Thanks

madcan, I used GOOGLE and all references to atiptaxx give the same solutions. Clark Atiptaxx ATIPtaxx.exe (ATI Technologies) ATI Task Bar Icon. This is a System Tray icon which gets installed when you install the ATI drivers. All this icon does is enable you to bring up the Display Properties from the System Tray. Since the Display Properties can be invoked in many other ways, this icon simply adds to the clutter of the System Tray. Recommendation : Go into the "Options" tab of the Display Properties and take the tick off the "Enable ATI Task Bar Icon" option. Next, delete the "ATIptaxx.exe" line with Startup Manager – this will prevent ATIPTAXX starting at boot-up. Note, however, that ATIPTAXX will still get started automatically every time you call up Display Properties, but at least it will not start automatically at boot-up. If you want to totally disable ATIPTAXX from starting at any time, and you are familiar with editing the Windows Registry, then home in on the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATI Technologies\Desktop, then the sub-key NoAtipta and set it to 1 instead of its 0 default (our Thanks to the AnswersThatWork user who told us about this).

Thanks Clark, I disabled it from loading at startup so that helps a lot. I'm still confused why it would grap almost all the cpu usage and keep it. Maybe I will also try to re-install the ATI drivers from scratch and see what happens. Thanks again. madclan

Can you find what file ATIptaxx.exe is in? If you can, you can rename it ATIptaxx.xxx, and it sould give you a warning Windows cannot open file when you start your machine. All you have to do is hit cancel and it will not run.