[Natox]

Hi, I have looked all over and seen somewhat related problems, but I couldn't find a solution that worked. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. I have a dual processor system, two AMD Opteron 244's, running Windows XP Professional with NUMA, because it has 3 Gb of RAM. One day I was looking at the task manager and suddenly noticed that the second CPU was maxed all the time. The process responsible for consuming about 50% of all CPU time (both CPU's together) was a process called "System." I understand that this groups a lot of things together, so I found some freeware called Process Explorer offered by Sysinternals. Process Explorer breaks the System process down into many other processes and creates two artificial processes called Deferred Procedure Calls and Hardware Interrupts out of the System process. It still shows about 50% of the System process's usage goes to the System process, 40% to Deferred Procedure Calls, and the other 10% to Hardware Interrupts. The program also shows that the thread taking up the most CPU usage for the System process has the start address ACPI.sys+0xfdbe. I have run Adaware and SpyBot, and they did not find anything special. I have also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the video driver because it acts up occasionally, and I have tried booting into safe mode and the problem remains. I have also been experiencing problems with Proventia Desktop, but I think that is entirely unrelated. It also seems like the longer I leave my computer on, the slower things seem to run and the more problems occur. For example, last night I tried doing the panda software online scan that scans for viruses and malware. I left the computer for about 3 hours and came back to find the scan froze 1/5 of the way through. That's when Proventia started acting up, although the Proventia problem may have been caused by SpyBot because I had done a scan with it just before that. Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

One thing I forgot to mention above is that the device manager shows an exclamation point next to Microsoft System Management BIOS Driver. It says that the driver is either corrupted or missing. This may be because an attempted install of Service Pack 2 crashed. It's a long story behind it, but basically, SP2 won't work with a lot of the drivers I have, which I didn't know when someone told me to install it. It froze halfway or so through and I had to end it. What do I do?

I have decided reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows might solve the problem, but I can't reasonably do that until next weekend, so I'll post the result then.