The first place I'd be looking is at your screensaver (Webshotstray) as this
could be what is stealing clock cycles. I'm also not clear as to why you have
the Windows Media Encoder (Wmencagt) loaded and running all of the time and
this is something I would disable and only run when required. Personally I'd
also be looking to dump the Symantec malware you have running and look for an
alternative less operating system hostile firewall but then again that's very
much a personal opinion and I don't think that this is the cause of your
problems but can't discount it without further testing.

So how to proceed? You are going to have to run your system with each of
these various applications disabled in turn until you find the once that is
causing you your problems.
--
Mike Maltby MS-MVP



bgaard wrote:

Booted system and verified clock was set to current
correct time. Ran AdAware and Spybot to verify system was
clean (it was).

Worked for about an hour, had Outlook Express, several
Word documents (no more that 2 at any given time, closed
when done working), and two Internet Explorer windows (one
for general browsing, one for streaming audio) open.
After about an hour, I noticed that my system clock had
lost 8 minutes. My cursor was jerky and system sounds
were echoing. I closed all open applications and checked
system resources. System properties indicated 512 MB of
RAM available and system resources were 61% free. WinTop
indicated the following 27 programs:

Idle
KERNAL32.DLL
MSGSRV.EXE
SPOOL32.EXE
MPREXE.EXE
MSTASK.EXE
CCEVTRMRG.EXE (Firewall/Virus scanner)
NISUM. EXE (Firewall/Virus scanner)
CCPXYSVC. EXE (Firewall/Virus scanner)
mmtask.tsk
STMGR.EXE
DEVLDR16.EXE
EXPLORER.EXE
TASKMON.EXE
SYSTRAY.EXE
WMIEXE.EXE
DDHELP.EXE
LOADQM.EXE
CCAPP. EXE (Firewall/Virus scanner)
AHQTB.EXE
WKCALREM.EXE
WMENCAGT.EXE
WINTOP.EXE
PSTORES.EXE
TAPISRV.EXE
WEBSHOTSTRAY.EXE (screensaver)
RUNDLL32.EXE

The Idle process had used about 1 hour of CPU time,
DEVLDR16 had used about 1 minute of CPU time and Explorer
had used about 4 Minutes CPU time (Cumulative). Idle was
consistently using 95% or more of the CPU except for brief
intervals (a second or so). Nothing else was using
significant CPU time.

The close program dialogue box indicated the following 10
programs:
WinTop
Explorer
Ccapp
Webshotstray
Loadqm
Wmencagt
Wkcalrem
Devldr16
Systray
Ahqtb

I then walked away from me PC and left it alone for an
hour (67 Minutes actual). No applications were running
during this time except WinTop, my screensaver (Webshots),
and my Firewall/Virus Scanner). When I returned, I
noticed that my system clock had lost an additional 26
minutes and was now 34 minutes slow. System properties
indicated 512 MB of RAM available and system resources
were still 61% free. WinTop indicated that 26 programs
were running, PSTORES.EXE was no longer on the list, the
balance matched the list from above. The Idle process had
used about 1 hour and 42 minutes of CPU time, DEVLDR16 and
Explorer remained at about 1 Minute and 4 Minutes
respectively. Idle continued to use 95% or more of the
CPU except for brief intervals (a second or so).


The close program dialogue box indicated the same 10
programs.

Can anyone tell me what is going on here?

-----Original Message-----
If your clock is an hour slow and it was correct when you booted your
system then you have an application running that is stealing clock
cycles and this same application could be what is causing you to have
problems with your mouse. As I said perhaps you should think about
posting details of the applications you have running on your PC when
this happens. --
Mike Maltby MS-MVP



bgaard wrote:

Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I reported above is what I
saw when my system slowed down. My clock was an hour
behind, cursor movement was jerky, everything was slow and
Wintop indicated that the CPU was 95% idle. I had 1 or 2
browser windows open at any given time, a word document,
and outlook express. My son encounters the same problem
when he plays on-line games (Warcraft). Shutting all of
the applications down does not improve performance - once
this behavior starts it continues until I reboot.


.