Explorer pegging CPU at 100% for Non-admins on Windows XP

[Hillel]

Hello,

My computer is running Windows XP SP2 on a 2.4GHz Celeron with 384MB
RAM. For a non-administrative user, using explorer.exe on "My
computer" will cause explorer to lock at 100% cpu until it is killed
through the task manager. Exploring one's own documents directory
works properly (even with AVI files), and the user can go up the
directory to the desktop, but will lock the cpu if clicking on "My
Computer". A similar cpu lock occurs often when any application uses
the "Save As" dialog box and the user changes the file name and then
clicks "Save". This only happens for non-administrative users and
does not appear to be the commonly mentioned AVI bug. The same users
can still view the root directories and traverse directory trees with
the command prompt. If it was a permissions issue I should just get
an "access denied" message, not pegging the cpu.

Any ideas on what this could be?

Thanks.
---Hillel

 

[JS]

You need to find the specific process or application that's taking all
the CPU resources and slowing down your PC.
Note that I've have not tried running this utility in a non-admin account.

To do this try Process Explorer:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Once you have Process Explorer installed and running:
In the taskbar select View and check 'Show Process Tree' and 'Show Lower
Pane' options.
(This will provide the detailed info you need)
Next click on the CPU column to sort processes by %CPU usage.
Then click on the process that's using most or all the CPU %,
once it's highlighted, right click and from the options listed select:
Search Online
This should display what out there on the web about that process.

Note: some entries like Explorer and svchost may need to be expanded to show
the detail,
(sub processes), in this case click on the + located to the left of the
entry.

Still another tool is What's Running
http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx

JS

 

[Hillel]

Wow, that Process Explorer is an awesome tool.

You can run Process Explorer as administrator from the non-admin
desktop. It is definitely the explorer.exe process itself, not a
subprocess. I set the lower pane to DLLs and the option to show new
processes. I then carefully watched which DLLs were used by
explorer.exe just as I tried to explore My Computer from the non-admin
desktop.

The problem turned out to be two DLLs from Century Software that were
installed with TinyTerm. I renamed them, and everything seems to work
now. Why they were firing up in explorer.exe whenever browsing the
local drive I do not know.

Thanks!
---Hillel

 

[JS]

Glad you found the problem.

JS

 

[JS]

You might want to look to see if any services that are associated with
TinyTerm, they could be what is causing the DLL issue.
The service name or names may or may not be obvious like Tiny, TinyTerm or
CenturyTT, Etc., if you find such a service you may want to try setting it
to 'Manual' instead of 'Automatic'. Then you may be able to rename the dll's
back to their original name.

JS