CPU Idle at 50%

[FlightSimBoy]

What is going on here? My CPU has been idling at 50% for quite some time now and I have no idea why. The task manager states that explorer.exe is the primary cause of this, but how/ why? I have ran AVG Free and Spybot and found nothing, so I don't think its a virus. HijackThis also comes up clean.

My Specs
Windows Vista Home Premium
2 GB PC4200 RAM
3.0 GHz Intel Pentium D 925 Dual-Core (Presler)
250gb SATA HD 7200 RPM
ATi Radeon X1650 Pro GPU, PCIe X-16
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 24-bit sound card PCI
WinFast PVR2 TV Tuner PCIe X-1

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[freestyler105]

Just reboot...and see if the problem persists.

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Didn't help at all. If it helps, I have 49 processes running, and I know about 9 or 10 of those are either my GPU or Soundcard software, but it is explorer.exe taking most of the CPU power.

Every time I log on to my PC, I immediatly begin to Ctrl+Alt+Del the unnecessary processes. When I do that to explorer.exe, my CPU goes back to 0% idle.

 

[worshipme]

Can you do a system restore to a point where explorer wasn't causing any problems?

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Err... no, I have system restore completely disabled. It slows my PC down too much and takes up too much hard drive space.

I've tried 2 restarts and still haven't fixed the problem. I don't know what could be going on anymore. This is starting to drive me insane.

EDIT- Just watched the performance indicator in the task manager. Core 2 is showing more activity than core 1, but they are both showing erratic data.

Another edit- My Internet is also goin a little slow. 120 k-bytes when it should be around 350.

 

[Bobert93]

virus maby , have you tryed doing a spyware test?

 

[FlightSimBoy]

Yeah, I tried AVG, Spybot and HijackThis. All come up clean.

Come to think of it, my PC didn't start doing this until I un-installed AOL. Wow, I might have something to back the saying "AOL is worse than your average virus."

Is there anything more comprehensive that I can/ should do to see what is going on with my computer?

 

[FlightSimBoy]

I just took a screny of my performance indicator.

Look at the second core. What is going on here?

EDIT- I messed with the affinity settings a little bit. When I set explorer.exe to only use core 0 (the first core) that graph for that core shoots up. Same with the core 1 (the second core). I'm confused now.

 

[Bobert93]

im confused aswell , these got to be somthing thats making your 2nd core nealy 100%

 

[A True Folder]

Down load and run Process Explorer, it should tell what is using Explorer.

I had a similar problem recently with 20% cpu usage, it was caused by a hardware interrupt because I had disabled my RAID controller. (I don't use RAID)