Anilrgowda

I bought a Compaq Presario R3424 laptop in March 2005, running Windows XP Home SP-2. 1.6 GHz AMD Athlon chip; 512 MB of memory; 55 GB hard drive. Machine is stand-alone, not networked. Uses built-in wireless; router is connected to a cable modem.
No exclamation points showing up the Device Manager, so it appears that all is well there. BIOS is up-to-date.

Sometimes, it would be running just fine but then very suddenly slow to a crawl, with the CPU usage jumping to 100%. In Task Manager, I could see that sometimes the offending process (taking up 99%) was winlogon (which of course can't be terminated), other times it was Outlook.exe, other times it was Word.exe. Sometimes when I kill the offending process, that solves the problem. But other times, anotherr process just goes to 99% when I kill the first process that was at 99%. I don't remember whether it has ever been other processes (such as explorer.exe or system.exe) that were stuck at 99%, but I do know that it has never been a process that was unfamiliar to me. The only thing that every got rid of this condition is a hibernate (usually) or a restart (always). When the problem happened, I had often (but not always) stepped away from the computer for a while right beforehand.

After running the leading spyware detectors (Ad-Aware, Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Norton, and online scans from McAfee and others), running the Norton WinDoctor diagnostic, doing lots of Google research, I gave up, went back to Microcenter in April 2005, and exchanged the laptop for an identical one. But then once I installed all my software on the new machine, the exact same thing started happening!

This is a very tough problem to troubleshoot because it happens only occasionally (perhaps twice a week), so it's nearly impossible to test different combinations of open applications, processes, etc. But when it does happen, it is very disruptive to my work because I tend to have a lot of applications open at one time, so I am very reluctant to reboot. So the process of getting the machine to hibernate might take 10-15 minutes because the CPU is so tied up that it can take 15 seconds just for the mouse to respond, which means it takes me 5 minutes just to open up Task Manager (versus a few keystrokes).

It could be some combination of software that is causing this problem, but it's all the same software and operating system that I had on my previous machine.
I have ensured that I have no extraneous start-up items in msconfig, and I have killed all unnecessary processes. No background tasks such as defrag are running. I can post a HijackThis log if that would be helpful.

Is there some kind of logging mechanism so that I can go back and see what occurred right below the jump to 100%? That might help narrow down the problem, since it could be a million things (based on my research so far in the ExpertsExchange knowledge base).

Suggestions are welcome, but what would be even better would be for someone to diagnose this for me via web conferencing. It would be willing to pay for someone's time to do this, as long as pricing and terms were discussed beforehand. Are there any companies (big or small) that specialize in providing that type of remote support using web conferencing tools?

Soln
Upgrade device driver smwdm.sys.