100% CPU Usage due to STMGR.EXE?

[Jonny M]

I have WinME running on a 1.2GHz Athlon and after random times
of windows use I have noticed that the CPU usage report from Norton System Doc goes to 100% and stays there. I have tried Ctrl Alt and Del to access the task menu and even after closing all the running programs listed the CPU stays at 100%.
I then read through some of the previous postings on here and found a program called WINTOP which upon running showed that
a file called STMGR.EXE was eating up 95-98% of the CPU.
What is this file and why does it keep my CPU at a high usage all the time. I tried leaving the PC alone for a long while to see if it dropped in percentage but it didnt.
Any help would be much appreciated:confused:

[michaeln]

Have a look at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/malmobcode/inx.html

This would tend to indicate that stmgr.exe may be a virus

[Jonny M]

Thanks for the link , I've just had a quick look and its shown under the malicious code section. Taking this into thought would it be wise to delete the file. Norton AV shows it as clean.

[michaeln]

No. Don't delete the file. As far as I can tell stmgr.exe is a windows file. What it does I don't know. I merely pointed out the link as it would appear that there may be a virus masquerading as stmgr.exe.

Beyond that I'm afraid I cannot help.

Do not delete the file unless you are sure it is a virus.

[bassman]

Stmgr.exe is part of the System Restore tool. If you want to disable it you must edit the Registry and disable it in the Control Panel

[Jonny M]

Thanks for the advice , only one problem. What effect would removing the entry in the registry have on the system running in general. I know that at the moment its itilising the cpu far too much so I guess I need to do something. A worse case senario would be to reinstall WinME and hope it doesn't reappear.

[BobyJo]

This is one good example of WinME being a recource hog.

I purchased ME when it first came out and after about a month of running it, I formatted the hd's in both our systems and reinstalled Win98se.

Win98se is not perfect by a lot. It is not the recource hog that ME is.

This no crash and restore features in ME is the hog. IT uses massive recources and cpu time, sometimes causing other programs not to run. This is due to a lack of system recources.

[Nemesis1s]

Had the very same problem. same file 2 and stuff. Norton Firewall was causing it with me. I just erased the baby and installed a other firewall. Now my cpu is at 4 % instead of 100 %