Mantorp's Journal: am I infected?

Pretty frequently when my PC is running slowly and laggish my Task Manager will tell me that Internet Explorer is taking up 98-99% of the CPU while using about 70MB of RAM. However, no IE will be visible on screen. It's like it's running in stealth mode doing its own thing.

It's got XP sp2 with all the latest patches. Since I'm a cheapskate I use the AVG free edition for antivirus and Windows Defender or whatever M$'s spyware protection is called. They both tell me daily nothing is wrong.

Any ideas? Thanks

Spybot S&D

[richie2000]

Take this for a spin: http://www.safer-networking.org/ [safer-networking.org]

Then install another browser. I use Seamonkey; you may prefer Firefox, Opera or something else.

Re:

[Mantorp]

Thanks, I'll see if this finds anything. I do use Firefox, been a tabbed browsing addict for years.

Re:

[Mantorp]

only cookies found, nothing too harmful. Maybe it's time for a rebuild?

Re:

[richie2000]

Could be. AFAIK, the MSIE rendering engine is used when browsing certain types of file folders, but any shenanigans there should show up as being by explorer.exe, not iexplore.exe. Same thing with e-mail, both OE and Outlook uses MSIE for rendering HTML e-mail, but they never launch the iexplore.exe binary, just use it's libs.
I don't know of anything else that could be using it like that...

/ When in danger or in doubt; reinstall, curse and shout.