Greetings,

I hope this is the right place to post this since it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

I recently upgraded my computer from WinME to WinXP Pro. It's a 1.2 ghz AMD Athlon with 512mb RAM. Since the upgrade, I've noticed that the CPU usage tends to idle between 55% and 65% even after being off all day. I get home from work, boot up and the CPU usage displays at least 55% right away. Some days (rarely) it will idle between 0% and 5% which I'm guessing is pretty normal. I don't have anything other than AIM loading at startup. I've checked the registry and all of the system files that load programs at startup, but I don't see anything out of the ordinary.

I did a full scan with one of the online scanners as well as the AVG scanner and found nothing. AdAware didn't turn up anything either.

I've done some searching on Google but nothing I found helped. According to the Windows Task Manager, there isn't anything else running on bad days that would explain the high CPU usage. I downloaded TaskInfo2002 and it displays a couple of extra processes that aren't shown in the Windows Task Manager. The one that caught my eye was "Interrupts Time" which is idling around 45%. At first I thought maybe it was a hardware conflict, but all my devices check out ok.

I'm at a loss, anyone have any ideas? Has anyone else had similar problems?