I was running into the same thing, and I found a solution, at least for me. It seems a service called SSDPSRV was trying to start, over and over, and never successfully started. Anyway, just attempting to start was eating up all of the resources.
You can look on BlackViper's site fore more info on it, but basically SSDPSRV is for UPnP services like network scanners, printers, etc. (Not the same as PnP like scanners connected directly to your computer). I went into services.msc and disabled the service. CPU resources went back to normal :-).
I'm not sure why it wouldn't start, there was no error associated. I found it by looking on my other XP PC and saw it was running, but not on the other. Trial and error wins again!
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