I recently reformatted my computer about a week ago and I recently noticed that explorer.exe is taking up way too much CPU and memory usage. It is at about 50% constant CPU usage, and memory fluctuates between 65mb and 120mb. I read that it could be due to a formatted hard drive, so I recently reformatted and the memory usage decreased down to the above levels (it was at around 160mb and peaked at
260mb!!!
Microsoft WindowsXP Professional
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz
1GB PC3200-DDR RAM
200GB HDD (80/120GB partition, system/data)
I know it is not related to a virus/spyware because I have Norton Antivirus, Microsoft AntiSpyware, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Spybot, and SpywareBlaster. I did scans of each of those, all turning up negative. I even used RegistryMechanic to clean out the registry and that did not do the trick.
Any thoughts?