I12BPhil

First, open your services list. (It's in 'Computer Management' under 'Control Panels' - classic view) Do a ctrl+alt+delete and open the Task Manager and switch to the tab that monitors CPU and network usage. Stop each running service one at a time (starting them again after your done testing each one) until you find the service eating up all the clock cycles. DO NOT alter the properties for a service unless you know which service is causing the problem. Stopping or disabling the RPC service in XP will make your system unusable!! I just went through this problem on 2 systems and both times it was the spooler service (spoolsv.exe) even though the task manager reported 'system.exe' was eating up the CPU. There was a huge file in one of the printers which I deleted and then the system was fine. I had just cleaned some viruses, so chances are it was put there by one of them.