A while back I got IE8 as a security fix and a less RAM hungry alternative to IE7. This is true as it seems to use only 60megs of RAM on google whilst my IE7 used 135megs of RAM on google. Now I went onto task manager and saw a horrific figure: 1.15GB RAM idling... I sorted out all the RAM hungry apps but there is one process that still bugs me: iexplore.exe. Its constantly eating 60 to 70 megs of my RAM and about 15% cpu... I tried end task but it just comes back a few seconds later. For now I left it on low priority but if there is any way to get the few precious megs of RAM back I would try it...

Thanks in advance. I can't live with something like that... I just can't stand to see useless processes sap my resources and give me popups every 30 minutes because the popub blocker keeps crashing. Why did I get Vista in the first place? oh yeah. because of non backward compatible drivers....

benjamingreggsmith,

If you are seeing the explorer.exe using that kind of CPU usage with no open proccesses then you need to see where it is located. If it is found in any place other than the system32 folder then it is probably a virus or worm or some other spyware. This would also explain why you have pop-ups galore.

I suggested that you do a complete system scan and try to see what it is that is being so active in the background!

just so you know I have run virus scan and all exe files are exactly where they should be. ie: (excuse the pun on the topic) explorer.exe is in system 32 folder and I dont think 5 anti spywares and several virus scan on several anti-virus programs lie. 0 infections. The cause lies else where. I'd also like to mention that IE8 and updates came from a cd due to me not wanting to reload agin... The computer doing this is not on the internet or network yet. So how did the stuff get there in the first place? I plan to get it connected to my router a little later today.