OT - Why is taskmgr.exe running at 16% - 25% constantly?

[AncientPC]

I ran anti-virus (Housecall), anti-spyware (Ad-Aware), patched OS (WinXP Home SP2). Nothing works.

A friend brought her laptop over for me to fix today. First thing when I turned on and logged in is that CPU usage is maxed out all the time. Turns out Trend Micro is causing most of the damage, the rest caused by taskmgr.exe. Looks the Trend Micro installation is corrupted somehow so I uninstalled it.

Now here's the kicker. When I boot into safe mode, the laptop works completely fine. This leads me to believe that it must be some virus / spyware masquerading as taskmgr.exe to cause the slowdown but nothing was caught.

I'm going to go ahead and start removing things from the registry boot list. Anybody else have any suggestions to try?

I would save an OS re-install as a last resort, mostly because I don't have a copy of WinXP Home and she didn't bring her Dell CD.

[AncientPC]

There's something I'd also like to add. Whenever doing something mundane (such as opening up the Control Panel) explorer.exe usage jumps up to max (70%+) and it takes a good 15-30 seconds to open up a simple window.

[AncientPC]

[censored] I guess no one's up in the wee hours of morning except for me.

%$#!ing allergies.

[Nfinity]

I'm up.

Run Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D in safe mode first. You need to run it in safe mode in case it is spyware that initiates at startup, as safemode bypasses most of that startup junk. The fact that everything works fine in safe mode points to either one of these types of spyware, or a corrupted startup file. You might try going to Run:, typing Msconfig, click on the startup tab, and writing all those entries down. Google those entries and you should figure out if they are spyware or not. You could also try posting the list on a support forum, they might help you. You could also post it here, I'm bored, I'll help.

[AncientPC]

Yup, I've already gone through the startup list. Will try the Ad-Aware in safe mode suggestion though.

[Nfinity]

make sure to download and run Spybot S&D as well. With both you can be reasonably sure you get 99% of all spyware as long as you get the most recent updates. Redundancy is the best policy with freeware.

[AncientPC]

No go, I just updated definition files for both programs, booted into safe mode, scanned with both programs (found nothing), restarted, still having the same problem. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[Nfinity]

Corrupt system file. First try re-installing windows over the previous install. This may solve the problem. If not, back-up all files that you want to keep, blah blah, you know the drill, format hard drive, and do a clean install.

[waffle]

Are there two taskmgr.exe's in the process list?

Try running another antivirus sweep, maybe Stinger (a quick standalone tool) or AVG Free (an antivirus progarm)?

Also, you could try running HiJackThis and looking for suspicious entries, or http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml (this is like msconfig, but better).

[Timer]

I just opened run, typed in msconfig and I got the following error message:

cannot find the file 'msconfig' (or one of its compnents.) make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available.

This has never happened before.

Any suggestions?