File manager consuming lots of CPU cycles

[Guest]

I am running a fully patched version of XP Pro. Occasionally, my PC will
slow down a lot. I check Task Manager and find that File Manager is
consuming about 50% of my CPU cycles and cannot figure out what it is doing.
More frustrating, I cannot figure out how to stop this except to reboot,
which means closing out of a lot of applications which is time-consuming.
Especially annoying as I lose all my wurrent IE7 windows/tabs. I tried
killing FIle Manager, but that crashed XP.

Any thoughts on how to figure out what is going on or how to restart File
Manger operation without taking down XP?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Guest]

Several background operations of the system might be running. Defrag, the
search 'indexing', Windows File Protection, CleanUp Manager, and so on.