My Windows XP Home computer has recently become very slow. All disk accesses/application loading takes forever. It was NOT like this a while ago. I remember installing Netscape 7.0 and upgrading to RealOne and after that noticed a severe degradation of performance. So I uninstalled Netscape 7 and RealOne...yet nothing has improved. I have defragged my HDD[80G], cleaned it up...but no changes. I do not see any memory hogs in the process report..only the system idle process reports 99% CPU usage at normal times...?? Nothing else seems wrong from the standard counters. The Task Manager Phy and Available are normally: 523808/355420 etc... CPU Usage does jump to 100% each time i try to load an app...but that shld be normal... Can someone suggest where I might even start looking? Thanks

I've heard that RealOne leaves behind spyware, and that's why so many people end up uninstalling it. The spyware and rubbish left behind can slow down your computer. You should download Ad-aware 6 from http://lavasoft.de which will detect and let you remove all traces of spyware. Once you've downloaded Ad-aware, you should update the definition files (you'll find the feature that lets you do that on the main window of the program). Then you should scan all your hard drive(s). It will list all registry entries and files that can be considered spyware. You'll have to check all the items that have been found, then follow the on-screen instructions to delete those items. Try not to use RealOnce anymore and stick to good old Real Player Standard. Good luck. Juan