[RyansTech]

It came time for a reinstall on my XP box so I fired it up and was about to start copying some stuff to my backup drive before reinstalling windows. Once windows loaded my guage was reading a solid 100% CPU activity and refused to slow down (this has never happened before). It let me slowly move folders around on the desktop but would not let me open any folders. It took about 2 minutes just for the taskmanager to come up. Once it did it showed explorer.exe at 99% of the CPU. Not wanting to fight with it or burn up my CPU from overheating I just decided to skip backup and just reinstall. To nobodies surprise the reinstall went great and now it runs just fine.

Any ideas as to what this could have been?

[silence782]

Probably just a runaway system process. It happens every now and again...

[Circa219]

I hate it when that happens. That occurs so much on my moms comp because she has too much spyware on it.

[RyansTech]

I didn't really have any spyware on there it was really random. just wanted to know if anyone else that has had this problem and knew what it was.

[Inaris]

only way to really know is to find the run away process and then you can bisect that down to what it is doing...
Since you have rebuilt, there is not anyway to check...

Circa219

There is a program available from sysinternals called process XP that is very usefull in finding out what is going on. You can look at the individual threads of a process and isolate the issue a that level. You might want to look at that as an option...

[RyansTech]

Originally posted by Inaris
only way to really know is to find the run away process and then you can bisect that down to what it is doing...
Since you have rebuilt, there is not anyway to check...

Circa219

There is a program available from sysinternals called process XP that is very usefull in finding out what is going on. You can look at the individual threads of a process and isolate the issue a that level. You might want to look at that as an option...

Well there were 2 explorer.exe processes running at full throttle. That seemed weird to me. Thanks for the suggestions.

[Inaris]

that is where Processxp comes into play. It will show you the location of the proccess and allow you to find the problem.

This is a trend I have noticed in the last year or two. Everytime a problem occurs, people rebuild. I have not rebuilt in several years now and my systems are still as stable as when I built them. I have had many problems, but I have always just fixed it and kept the system running. it always makes me worry cause when people repair their problem, they can pass on the knowledge, whereas if they haven't they have nothing to share. It's very sad...

Not that I'm ragging on you guys, I'm just saying it's a bad habit to get in, and sharing my thoughts...

Good Luck

[RyansTech]

I hear ya Inaris. I don't get along with my PC all that well. We are in a love hate relationship. I like my mac