Mysterious Background Process

[juju]

I have a problem on my wife's Windows machine. This is extremely frustrating, and i'm not sure anyone here will even have an answer. But here goes anyway.

When the mouse and keyboard are idle for exactly 1 minute and 30 seconds, the mouse pointer starts quickly alternating between the busy-hourglass pointer and the regular pointer, and then back to the busy pointer, ad infinitum until you press a key or move the mouse. It's very annoying! I'm so sick of looking at that flashing pointer! The only way to not have to look at it is to either turn the monitor off, or move the mouse every 1 and a half minutes.

I've ran the lastest Ad-aware, and i've ran the lastest Norton Antivirus. Neither of them detected a damned thing. I've gone through and tried uninstalling everything I could think of that could possibly be the culprit. Nothing seems to make it stop.


Here is a screenshot of my running processes while this is occuring. My last hope is looking up every process on google to see what it does. But my second-to-last hope is that someone else here might know what this is already. Anyone?

http://comp.uark.edu/~dmorton/images/misc/task1.jpg

My wife was listening to a cd via Windows Media Player when I took the screenshot. But I know it's not that process that's the culprit, cause it's not running normally.


Svchost.exe seems to be a default process for dll's that do stuff. So, here is a list of all the dll's that are currently running via svchost.

Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.

C:\>tlist -s
0 System Process
8 System
140 SMSS.EXE
164 CSRSS.EXE Title:
184 WINLOGON.EXE Title: NetDDE Agent
212 SERVICES.EXE Svcs: Browser,Dhcp,dmserver,Dnscache,Eventlog,lanmanserver
,lanmanworkstation,LmHosts,Messenger,PlugPlay,ProtectedStorage,seclogon,TrkWks,W
mi
224 LSASS.EXE Svcs: PolicyAgent,SamSs
404 svchost.exe Svcs: RpcSs
464 spoolsv.exe Svcs: Spooler
492 defwatch.exe Svcs: DefWatch
508 svchost.exe Svcs: EventSystem,Netman,NtmsSvc,RasMan,SENS,TapiSrv
536 tcpsvcs.exe Svcs: LPDSVC
560 rtvscan.exe Svcs: Norton AntiVirus Server
628 nvsvc32.exe Svcs: NVSvc
300 regsvc.exe Svcs: RemoteRegistry
676 mstask.exe Svcs: Schedule
732 WinMgmt.exe Svcs: WinMgmt
768 MsPMSPSv.exe Svcs: WMDM PMSP Service
780 svchost.exe Svcs: wuauserv
852 explorer.exe Title: Program Manager
964 MSGSYS.EXE
1032 hpztsb04.exe Title:
1096 evntsvc.exe Title: Notification Wnd for RNAdmin
1116 SrchAsst.exe Title: Aornum 13753
1128 vptray.exe Title: Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition
1196 mozilla.exe Title: The Cellar - Post New Thread - Mozilla {Build ID: 20
02053012}
1172 rundll32.exe Title: NVIDIA TwinView Window
1028 wmplayer.exe Title: Windows Media Player
264 CMD.EXE Title: Command Prompt - tlist -s
196 tlist.exe


hpztsb04.exe is something to do with my printer driver. I upgraded to the latest driver and that didn't fix it either. :(
Also, my wife tried disabling Norton Antivirus. You guessed it -- that didn't work.

I may actually end up reformatting just to get rid of that damned idle busy pointer.