This might be helpful to you! A couple of weeks ago my computer slowed right down and stayed slow: CPU usage was constantly running at 100% even when I was doing nothing and there were no additional tasks suddenly running in the background that I knew about. After a few days of that I carried out a system RESTORE. That solved the problem but it was a bit of a pain as I lost of a couple of software installs and some data files. I know I could have saved the data files by putting them into My Documents before restoring! Today, at the end of my seminar on Activity Based Costing, I was shutting the computer down when Narrator opened itself. I closed it Narrator and switched off the computer. When I came to reboot, the system was really slow and Narrator opened again. I closed Narrator but not the computer. The system ground along really slowly again ... 100%CPU usage again. Rebooted again and although Narrator didn't open the system was still really sluggish. So, I opened Narrator and unchecked all the things it wanted to do for me and closed it down. INSTANTLY my system got back to normal: CPU usage bouncing along at a normal 4% ... 11% ... 1%. Maybe I found the cause of YOUR problem, too? Made me happy anyway! DW