My sister downloaded "Zwinky" (whatever that is) and the My Web Search toolbar and it tried to take over by resetting my homepage and slowing performance etc. so I uninstalled it. After uninstalling it I was still getting 100% cpu not when idle but as soon as I do anything that requires cpu it goes up to 100% right away SO I ran Malwarebytes and it cleaned up whatever it could but still have same problem then I tried trend-micro and so on and so on but whatever it is is still there but somehow escapes every means of detection I've ever known! It's getting worse everyday the movement of the mouse gets glitchier and it takes longer and longer for windows to boot. Is it possible for a malware/trojan/virus or whatever to be that elusive? This is the same way my first hard drive got wrecked... it progressively got worse until I reformatted it and after that I installed windows again and it was STILL THERE. I had to junk the hard drive. Anybody know what this is or how to fix it? I have 450 gigs of files that has taken me months to download. This would be devastating.

Hi sKiTzo,

Can you tell us a bit more about your system.
How many cores do you have (taskmanager->performance tab and count the graphs).
You can also find the name of the process that is using the cpu under the processes tab. You may need to go into the View menu to activiate the CPU indicator. Once you find the name of the process then publish it here.

That is precisely the problem, when the cpu is spiked at 100%, no process shows to be the culprit! They all say 0. This is unbelievable...

One of them must show something. Make sure the "show processes from all users" is checked.

OK, I'm getting closer to nailing this - I did a clean reinstall and cpu still spiking so i ran process explorer from sysinternals and it shows that the hardware interrupts are eating up the cpu, so it's a hardware drivers issue.....I THINK. I went to device manager and it shows that the hd drivers are IDE but my hd is SATA. Could this be the problem?

Problem Solved!! http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006...-hardware.html