Windows XP Professional w/ SP2 (Explorer.exe using more and more CPU power)

Recently I discovered movies skipping while playing in Winamp, Media Player 6 or BSPlayer. I tracked down the culprit, explorer.exe.

I setup a performance monitor and watched as explorer.exe slow grabbed more and more CPU cycles. 3%, 7%, 13%, 27%, 53%! I then killed all processes running in my machine and shutdown all non operating system required processes and still explorer.exe ate up more and more CPU.

Killing the process would drop it back down to the 0% to 2% range but give it a couple hours and it would be back upto 53% again.

After about 3 days, I decided to wipe out Windows, reinstall fresh, and put in all brand new software and drivers for everything.

And then, it returned. Same thing. So I began some more indepth troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting:

1) Video card software issues (because of overlay) - Tried nVidia card in place of ATI card. NO RESULT.
2) Video codec issues (it was divx/xvid afterall) - Fresh install, brand new codecs. NO RESULT.
3) Hardware related issue (TV Card? Sound Card? Motherboard?) - See below.

Solution:

This was eventually tracked down to an issue with my motherboard, Sound Blaster Live! Value and AverMedia TV Expert 2000 PCI. For some reason, they did not want to work together in harmony.

Swapping slots did not solve the problem. Removing the AverMedia TV Expert 2000 PCI did not solve the problem.
Removing the Sound Blaster Live! OEM solved the problem. AverMedia TV Export 2000 PCI back in, and everything is running fine.

Sound Blaster Live! card snapped in half. Now using onboard sound.

Hope this helps someone out.

Thanks for the help. The older Creative cards had some compatibility issues with certain motherboards. Perhaps this was a symptom of that.

WOW!..All that and it was your SB Live Card(Value)...I had the same sort of issues with an SBLive card..stay away from them...junk!

VALUE= You get what you pay for.