Explorer.exe Running Very High

[foolishone]

So I turned on my monitor after I came home from work, and found my computer to be extremely slow, opening folders, even empty ones, takes at least 30 seconds, with the sound of my computer "thinking" going the whole time. I opened a task manager and attached is what I saw.

I run both Prime95 and F@H, 24/7, as well as ZoneAlarm and Gmail Notifier. I closed all those and all open windows and the mem usage for explorer.exe didn't change. I have been running that setup for 6 months and nothing like this has ever happened, at idle it is usual between 1 and 2,000(w/ the programs above closed).

Ran spyware software and no help. Checked for wierd programs in the Add/Remove in Control Panel, nothing there I didn't authorize/want.

FYI: Page File is 431MB!!!! And that's with a gig of RAM.

How would I go about getting that down.? My computer feels like the hard drive is at 1 rpm, has 1mb of ram, and runs at 1 Mhz.

EDIT: I had no idea where to put this, so move if necessary.

[Statica]

You did run an antivirus check?

Is this after a fresh reboot? I'm asking because you didnt mention if this was after a reboot or after you just turned on the monitor and found your system slow. Sometimes your system gets bogged down because of a number of reasons like bad code running that doesn't terminate and release resources effectively.

[macko72]

Any malware can be named anything - so you should check where the files of the running processes are located on your disk. If a "non-Microsoft" .exe file is located in the C:\Windows or C:\Windows\System32 folder, then there is a high risk for a virus, spyware, trojan or worm infection!

[foolishone]

Firstly, explorer has calm down alot, with FF and Windows Media Player paused it is stable at 22,000.

With regards to the questions,

1) Yes I did reboot, several times, and it kept spiking straight up after I would try and do any productive, aka click the start menu.

2) I did run ZoneAlarm AV which came up absolutely empty, sometimes it comes up with xxxxx.Trojan in the Java cache, but it didn't even do that.

3) Ran Microsoft's AntiSpyware (which I am very impressed with) and it also came up with nothing.

Like I said, it did come down and everything is ok now.

(While explorer was running high, I attempted to view the properties of a file, and it didn't come up so I tried it a few more times and still nothing. About 30 min later, while I was typing something up in Word, 5 property boxes just all the sudden popped up. And from then on it was fine. It was almost like there was literally a clog in the CPU or something.)

^fo