I am really careful about wasting people's time I don't want to be seen as lazy... :S So, I'm not going to bother sending the hijack this logs since the HDD is clean as far as I can tell scouring the nether regions of the deleted zone. I do understand that after you delete files, that the files are still there, they have just been marked as available space and can be overwritten. The results from the following trial convinced me that it wasn't a software issue, anyway.

The computer was clean and it was a faulty processor. My bud did 15 runs of prime95 on both cores and the CPU failed 12 out of 15. The 15 runs were done on 4 different rigs (including mine) and the chip exhibited the same behavior on all of them.

We still can't pin down the exact cause (I thought it was a timing issue or something) its just sometimes at a completely random time it will go haywire and will be spiking until the computer is rebooted.

All the OS were as follows. Windows XP Pro X64, Home edition x32, Windows XP media center X32, Windows Vista Home Premium x32.

My computer was a fresh reformat with just the basics installed. I had all my games and junk on an external HDD.

I was able to get a replacement processor. We just shrugged it off as a defective chip. Don't think this is a common problem since I haven't found any other posts about it.

We have buried it in an undisclosed location in the dead of the night near jimmy hoffa's grave and will now deny such a chip ever existed.