Ok, this might be the weirdest PC performance issue I've ever seen.
Starting sometime yesterday, my laptop starting running extremely
slowly. Since it was nearly the end of the day, I just assumed
some application (figured it was IE7) had just leaked some memory,
and since I was shutting it off soon, didn't give it much thought.
However, this morning I was having the same issue. So I opened
up Process Explorer to try and seeing what was eating all the
CPU cycles. The only thing eating CPU was the Interrupts and
DPCs. This really had me scratching my head. What the heck
would be causing my PC to slow down so much?
A quick search on 'Net lead me to a forum post that indicated
USB issues could cause DPC CPU spikes. So, I look over at
my laptop and notice I still have a USB cable plugged in to
my laptop, that is not plugged into anything.