CPU 100% with explore.exe!!!

Blue--Z

After hunting down a solution for days now, I have finally narrowed the problem down using Process Explorer and Process Monitor, Anti-virus softwares and all that jazz. Now I have found a dead-end, and need help.

System:
Vista Home Premium x64 for Pavilion dv5-1137la, bought 3 months ago. 320GB, 4096MB, AMD turion X2 Dual-Core

Problem:
CPU spikes to 100% constantly, keeps around 70-90% all the time, making the computer very slow and overheating it.

Troubleshooting so far:
- Full virus scan with AVG, Spybot S&D and Windows Defender -> found nothing
- Process Explorer shows the culprit as explore.exe, which uses most of the CPU
-> opening the process shows that all CPU is used by a thread "SHLWAPI.dll!PathIsRootW+0xcc"
-> stacking this thread shows various .dll processes such as "SHLWAPI.dll!PathIsRootW+0x195" and "DpoFeedb.dll+0x4932
"
-> locating this process takes me to "shlwapi.dll " located under C:\Windows\System32
- Used Process Monitor to detect which program is using up the shlwapi.dll through explore.exe, and found dllhost.exe to be the culprit
- checked that dllhost.exe is not a malware. It is located in C:Windows\system32 as well.

Now what?
I have narrowed down the problem: almost all of the CPU is used by dllhost.exe through shlwapi.dll through explore.exe.
Now what? Knowing this is not really helping. So far I understand dellhost.exe is important for internet through COM Surrogate. But it shouldn't be the case that CPU remains constantly near 100%, when no other software is taking up the CPU.

Can I kill the shlwapi.dll process, and rename/delete the file? Will this affect the performance of my computer? What now???

Thank you for your help!

nrqed

People seem to have solved the problem in this thread

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...e-f3c3b34deed8

Blue--Z

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I have read the thread you gave me before, but unfortunately it wasn't the solution for me. I did what the guy in the thread did, but the problem persisted, and that is exactly because the problem is the dllhost.exe using the shlwapi.exe.

Thanks anyhow. :) Any other suggestions?