My son's notebook recently started freezing for periods of time. Looking at it, I see explorer.exe running at 99% cpu usage constantly. I ran ad-aware and removed some malware, cleaned up the DISK so there is plenty of space (it had been down to 450M), made sure norton was up to date and ran a scan, used system restore to set everything back a few weeks (and then redid all the stuff above), etc.

None of that made much difference. After I reboot the machine, THINGS are OK for some period of time, but then (within minutes) explorer goes back to 99%.

If I can find the disks for his machine I will PROBABLY reinstall the OS soon, but that will be a real pain.

Anyone have any suggestions?Try turning off System Restore, then running your virus and spyware scans again.Yep, you've got a critter there.

I would clean off some more space as well, or disable the trash can, or both just to be sure.Try ending it.

Things will go BLANK for sometime, but after some seconds they will appear.
99% things will be okay now.