I am looking at my roomate's pc and same issue. running Win XP, SP3. To run any program takes about 5 full minutes. CPU usage 100% in Norton Anti Virus (NAV) or taskmanager. For now i am just using taskmanger to see the %. The only way to get it to 0-2% is to restart in safe mode. Went to Start/run and msconfig, checked the "Load System Services" only button, went to "Services" tab, hid Microsoft services and unchecked all services, then restart. The cpu 100% is still pegged at 100% but the pc definitely is noticeably running programs faster.(practically normal) Does anyone know how to fix this? I ran a full system NAV scan, and a spybot search and destroy scan that only found a few cookies. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 1 person got this answerI do too

Has MSUpdate been run for Important updates ONLY. Have the system drivers been updated from PC maker or HW makers?Earlier versions of Norton were known rescource hogs, I would uninstall Norton and use the utility on their site to completely remove, then test the system (in conjunction with the first)

Dear Palcouk, i found out the problem. For any one who has either taskmanager/Norton AV and it shows cpu at 100% steady, but when your pc is restarted in safe mode (pressing F8 many times after restart) it seems to drop to 0-2%. Download and run Process Explorer. Once run with your cpu showing 100%, look under the CPU column. Which ever program you see running the highest cpu usage is the problem. You can verify this like i did by right clicking and "kill process". Then recheck your cpu usage. Should be 0-2% which is normal if you are not running many programs. In my roomates case when i hovered the mouse over the svhost program that was using 99% cpu, it showed a program that came from an HP servoce. It turned out that she recently reinstalled hp printer drivers and somehow it corrupted her pc. The fix was to reinstall over the HP software to over write the corruption because we were unable to uninstall all of the HP software. She told me she tried to "repair" the software earlier, but that is probably where the corruption came from. Problem solved.Thanks,screamn7