[H] Strange Problem...rootkits?

[Rob Finger]

Hello all,

I was at a friends house last night working on their computer.  They had 
a virus on the computer that I knew of and because of AOL and a Norton 
Def update on March 15th the Internet stopped working.  After calling a 
special Symantec hot line for this fix I was able to get back on and 
download the removal tool for the virus.  I ran Spybot in Safe Mode and 
cleaned up a bunch of spy ware along with the system startup listing.  
After the reboot the computer still runs very slow.  Login from the XP 
screen takes about 5 to 7 min.  After you let it sit for a while then 
things seem to speed up a little but this is a 3.0 ghz machine.  Ram is 
not a problem but when I watch Task Manager the processor usage runs no 
lower then 50% and usually peaks about 90% but never drops below that.  
When looking at the process list the CPU usage does not seem to add up 
to 100% but I am assuming that it should.  In fact the System Idle 
Process runs anywhere from 50 to 90%. 

There is nothing I can see that is taking up all this processor time.  I 
have been reading about these rootkit viruses and the thread about 
malware.  Could this be what I am experiencing???


TIA,

Rob