I recently had a very trying experience with my main computer which I use for all my programming and web design duties. To make a long story short, no matter what I did, every step took forever, and with many Internet connections, the time taken was so long, that pages at the other end would time out.

My first step was the old 'three finger salute' - Control, Alternate, Delete. On my XP machine, this brings up Windows Task Manager, a totally necessary system utility. My first step was to click on the Performance tab to see what my minimum CPU use was. To my shock and horror, even with no programs running, my minimum CPU Usage was 42%. Performing a single simple task would drive the CPU Usage up to 100%, and take forever. My first thought was either a virus, Trojan, or Spyware. So I executed McAfee and did a thorough search (including heuristics) of my complete machine.

I also did a complete system scan with Microsoft Anti-Spyware. It found a few things which were removed, but the situation was not improved. On a recommendation, I downloaded Spyware Doctor, which found a few more things. But their removal did not correct the problem. This is an excellent and fast program which I highly recommend. You can get it HERE

Finally I opened the Processes tab on Windows Task Manager, and went up and down the CPU column, looking for the process which was stealing all my cycles. To my surprise, the culprit was a system file called explorer.exe. It was running 40% of CPU time at idle, and would would quickly shoot up to 100% if I typed on the keyboard. When I checked a laptop on XP Pro it was running explorer.exe at around 4%.

In desperation I turned to the Internet and searched Google for phrases like 'computer too slow' 'CPU Usage too high', 'explorer.exe stealing CPU cycles' and similar phrases. After a while I ran across a message board posting where a fellow had found that a Trojan had highjacked the explorer.exe file, and was hiding there. His solution was to delete the explorer.exe and then reinstall it. I looked at this advice with a large dose of skepticism, as I had deleted this file once before with BAD results. The only way I had found to recover was to reboot my machine.

But as I was desperate, I decided to chance it. The first step is to make sure that this is the process that's stealing your CPU time. The procedure is to find the explorer.exe file and right-click on it. On of the choices on the pop-up list is 'End Process'. Click on this, and explorer.exe will disappear. Immediately go up to the 'File" option on the top menu bar. Click on 'File', and then click on 'New Task (Run...)' from the drop-down list. Now carefully type "explorer.exe" into the 'Open' box, and click OK. For some reason when the file is added this way, the computer picks up the right file, but at boot-up it selects the hijacking file.

I have no idea why the computer operates this way, but it solved the problem. I immediately ran Spyware Doctor and killed everything that it found including a file called "trojan-anti" which I suspect was the real culprit. I sincerely hope that others on the Internet do not experience this problem, but if they do, I hope that this entry and description helps some other sufferer get his machine set right.
Dave