> This may sound wacky, but I've had the same problem (though it was
> intermittent).
>
> What it turned out to be was that there is a W2K feature that
> scans and
> indexes all of the files on the system for use by the Search... tool.
Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but there's a "feature" in most of the windows OS's called "find-fast" which does this file indexing. It does, as I recall, take up reams of CPU and runs quite often.
Find this and kill it. The search tool will still work fine w/o it, albeit not as fast.
