Andy, it looks to me like you may have either a virus or some type of spyware, and that the hard-drive access is eating your lunch. I know you said you scanned for both, but I recall once having a virus that disabled my Mcafee anti-virus, and left it appearing to still work! What programs do you have running on your taskbar at any given time? Anything like a weather bug, a news headline, anything that would requre constant hard-drive access?
What anti-virus and anti-spyware are you using, and are they kept up to date? I'd suggest deleting and reinstalling the anti-virus, to be sure that's functional, and I highly recommend "Adaware" as an anti-spyware program. It's free and seems to catch everything. Just as an aside, the company I work for - a major life insurance carrier - will not allow any computers used for the business to use IE7. There are just too many issues with it to use in this environment. 73 Dave KB3MOW > Thanks Bernie, I usually use IE 7 with XP sp2. I am using IE7 to type > this message since my test a few minutes ago with Firefox did not > replicate the problem. Also looks like IE7 is working OK as I type > this. In taskmanger 98 of the CPU is currently listed as "system ilde > process" , alg.exe is using 150,648 of RAM. >