EXPLORER.EXE

[tSwitch]

Explorer.exe is acting like malware.
it eats up most of my CPU every so often.  Sits there and forces my usage to 70% and up.

AVG scans reveal absolutely nothing, and I have it scan nightly.

Not sure if windows was doing a superslow automatic update or not, but I doubt it, since I turned that off.

I'm running Vista Ultimate x64 SP1, which has ran perfectly up until last month.
I can't wait for March, hopefully conversion to a Hackintosh will work.

anyway.  Any ways to fix this in the meantime?

[Blizzard]

There is a similar thread by FTS. It sometimes does the same with me on XP SP2. :/

[tSwitch]

There is a similar thread by FTS. It sometimes does the same with me on XP SP2. :/

it's pissing me off when it does that in the middle of a match of TF2 or something

[Hellfire Dragon]

Does the same to me on Windows XP SP3 No viri, spyware, malware etc either...  I thought it was just me

[Xero Shifter]

Exporer.exe is a necissary process in windows, its the thing that allows you to brows your computer and it's files. It ocassionally does this for long periods of time. There is no REAL fix for it, its windows, there is the problem right there. I really sugest you defrag and pray it works. You see.... windows requires what is refered to as a GIANT RAM PENIS!!!!!! It unecissarilly requires massive ammounts of ram for no good reason, processor too. Ubuntu linux can do 4 times as much with half the resources, that is how bad it is, and it gets worse, the more updated your windows becomes. It has nothing to do with Ubuntu being good or anything, its everything to do with windows being a resource whore.....
Cant tell you more than that. Sorry. If someone knows more than I do about this, please show me im wrong, i really hope im wrong and that windows doesn't suck that bad, but until then....

[Blizzard]

That's not entirely true. Windows uses pre-fetch (XP) and a similar system, which I don't know the name anymore, in Vista. That can take up quite some RAM. If you have more RAM, it will use more.

[tSwitch]

I'm not talking RAM, I'm just talking CPU speed.
my computer idles at 1.00gb to 1.2gb (VistAIDS) but the CPU will suddenly spike.

I was going to attempt a system restore, but I don't know if/don't want to reformat my harddrive.

normally when I'm gaming I just close explorer.exe and alt-tab if I need to check my IMs or IRC, then re-start explorer when I'm done.