Explorer.exe Problems
 

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!!! :eek:

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?

http://www.trendmicro.com/en/home/us/enterprise.htm

Click on "Free Online Scan".

I had a problem for awhile. Everything was starting to lock up on me. Norton Antivirus was run on a weekly basis and never found anything.

Was told to hit that site and did. Total result... I had 56 of the same virus on my computer. It would copy itself, because of all the times that I used System Restore.

I had to reformat everything. It was a pain in the butt, but I've basically been virus free since then.

Good Luck

No viruses were found on my system using the online scanner. I scanned both my C:\ (System) and D:\ (Data) drives and it found nothing. After the scan, memory usage increased to 183mb for explorer. This problem is really unnerving since I cannot find any reason as to why it is occuring. There are no suspicious programs running in the background, nor any suspicious processes. No viruses/spyware/adware at all.

Nevermind: CULPRIT FOUND!
Apparantly WindowsXP and Divx are not the best of friends. A large .avi file that was on my D: was the culprit and it took some creative methods to delete the file (booting into Safe Mode with Command Prompt, then del "D:\...."