Do you by any chance have the Yahoo toolbar? I've found a couple of posts where REMOVING or DISABLING that Yahoo toolbar resolved the same issue.

Hi guys. Thanks for continuing to help me.

First up, I don't have the Yahoo toolbar but I do have the Google one.

I disabled Smooth Scrolling. Unfortunately it didn't make much difference. Everything is still painfully slow, although as I said before there was a slight improvement after the Malaware clear out.

I tried IE for around five minutes or so and noted the behaviour of Task Manager. To me it seems bizarre. Upon launch of IE the CPU usage is up and down like a Jack in a Box. jumping between peaks and troughs at intervals of every second. Up, down, up, down. As regular as clockwork. As high as 100% and as low as 2%. This continued the entire time IE was open although after 5 mins or so the peaks were lower. probably 80% the maximum.

On launch of IE The PF usage leaps to exactly 1gb. It then rises slowly and steadily over the next 5 mins, eventually peaking and holding at 2.10gb.

Just after that I navigated to a different webpage. It was only a blog page. Nothing fancy. I got the Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close error message. Some kind of flash error apparently.

I closed IE. The CPU and PF of course immediately plummetted back to normal levels.

Don't know if any of that help you help me. I hope so.

Are we agreed Firefox works okay but IE doesn't?

@Elpmek - Thanks for you input, Elpmek. Please stay with us on this one if you wish. More ideas are appreciated!

@Lordknob - 2 things for you. Apologies if you have already tried them.

1> Go to IE tools
2> Go to Internet options
3> Go to Advance settings
4> In the bottom you have button for "reset internet explorer settings"
Just click that after closing all other programs. Restart IE and you are done with your problem

AND

Have I suggested DISABLING your IE add-on's yet? Perhaps you've got an add-on that has gone haywire. Those are found under Tools -> Manage Add-ons

A breakthrough! Well, I hope so anyway.

I guessed resetting IE would remove automatically disable all the add ons so I skipped straight to that step.

On relaunching IE I was asked by Norton Protection Centre whether I wanted their phishing filter as default. I said no, so as to test things with a blank canvas.

Unfortunately there was very little change other than the problems kicked in a little later than usual.

But the Norton reminder made me curious. I went to the add ons and discovered that all had been disabled except for two.

Norton Confidential - a Browser Help Object
and
Show Norton Toolbar - Toolbar

To view IE there is no evidence of them in operation - there is certainly no toolbar. I disabled them, and, before relaunching IE, turned off Norton completely. Things were dramatically improved.

As a test, I exited again, turned Norton back on (although once again said no to the phishing filter), went to the add ons and there they were again, Norton Confidential and Show Norton Toolbar, both enabled. Soon enough the system began to have problems.

Thoughts?

Please respond to post #17

- because it establishes whether it's a browser problem or just IE.

Also looking at your logs, you would agree your present malware defence doesn't work.

I'd strongly suggest you uninstall Norton for which you need their special tool:

Norton Removal Tool 2009.0.5.26 - V3.co.uk - formerly vnunet.com

Re-install later if appropriate.

also Spyware Doctor.