explorer hogging CPU

[bum]

I'm running Windows XP Home+sp2. The rest is in my sig. Anyways much of the recent time, Explorer.exe has been hogging my CPU useage (between 40% and 100%). I Tried the obvious solutions of end tasking and then re- start explorer, then my whole computer, killing excess processes, all no dice. So then I thought maybe I'm having an unstable OC, so I went and set back to stock speeds, that made it much worse. All the tools I have say I have a stable OC (wtf?) and yet if I just sit here browsing the internet its slower than ever. I'm certain that a reinstall of windows, would fix this, but my question is simply WTF??? What could cause explorer to screw things up when nothing is really being done?

%#$@ing Emo$oft!!!

 

[Trotter]

Explorer.exe is Windows. Kill explorer, and your computer shuts down.

Something else is going on here.

 

[bum]

Explorer.exe is Windows. Kill explorer, and your computer shuts down.

Something else is going on here.

Second part not true: I just did it. FYI you can kill explorer, but you have to click the new task thing in the task manager and type in explorer. That restarts it and you can go on with whatever you were doing.

 

[Trotter]

Still doesn't explain why it's acting up, though.

 

[bum]

Yeah agreed and this is one thing I really want to understand to.

 

[Trotter]

I'm running FF2, uTorrent, Yahoo widgets, WindowBlinds, Free Desktop Clock, Windows Defender, CA AntiVirus, Folding@Home, and ObjectDock... but explorer.exe is at 0% w/11,156K.

Maybe one of the MS whizkids will have an idea.

 

[fixal0t]

virus scan needed
check running processes, for suspicious entries
there are a couple of known explorer.exe issues with current viruses
try MS updates as well, some fix security issues and resolve this particular issue too.