I have a new Gateway dual core, 1GB, WinXP Media Edition pile of junk. After booting up, it it becomes mostly unusable within a couple of hours due to Win Explorer gobbling up more than 50% of CPU resources. Re-booting calms the beast down for another couple of hours. After customer support could not resolve my problem, I painstakingly re-formatted and re-installed Win XP. The same problem returned. Please note that this is not due to a virus, adware or other nasty. Also note that it is not due to a corrupt .AVI file. The few I have are stored on a separate disc, play good, and not accessed when the problem occurs. I tried using a windows explorer replacement, but can't access my desktop or other programs. Hitting the windows logo flag thing does nothing. If nothing can fix this, do you know of a Win Explorer replacement that will let me access all programs and my desktop.
That's what I get for trying to help when I've got a million other things going on. I'd make sure that DMA is enabled on each IDE channel, and that all applicable chipset drivers are installed and functioning.