Member in trouble

Simply run an anti-virus program if you feel its a virus, or if you have System Restore on, then try restoring to a date when your system worked perfect, may be older than 2 days, also remember that System Restore does'nt affect any of your downloaded stuff.

If you have partitioned your hard disk, then you can easily format the System drive [usually C:] and you will just have to run the updates once for Windows as well the programs installed.

to check for nasties:

try installing this: http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

once installed, let it update then run it

maybe you got a mailer doing mass spams from your side?

anything on your side not running on the other?

do you use anything like Process Explorer?  You'll see more stuff running in it than in task manager.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Thanks Amitsaran and Bichur for your interest and suggestions. I'll try these out before resorting to anything else. By the way would deleting my account and then creating a new one (different user name) be worth a try?

create the new one first

see how it runs

move your docs and stuff to that if it's okay - I'd scan them first to be safe

then delete your old account

then rename your new account

Go to the working account and create a new acct then copy the docs from the acct not working to the new one. After that try the new acct and if everything is ok delete the non working acct completely even the files via user accts and remove.

good luck

That is an option, but before doing that I think I would try the restore function and go back to a date that you feel the computer was running okay.  Running anti-virus and anti-maleware and spyware programs is not a bad thing to do at anytime you think the computer is acting strange.

Thank you all so much. I think I'll persevere with trying to find out what's wrong with the "damaged" account before trying something else. McAfee and Defender found nothing amiss. The only differences between the two accounts at startup is that I run Nuonsoft's Wallpaper Cycler and Fences (both running ok for ages). 

i got that little red shield in tray with popups telling me I was infected and needed their software to fix it

Trendmicro found nothing

malwarebytes found all the files and cleaned them out

Gammeldansk...listen to bichur. I've done malwarebytes and was NEVER sorry.

Do it before anything else.

Then take 2 aspirins and call me in the morning.  Keep smiling bud!

Malwarebytes is what I would suggest also, and it is free. I ran it today on my sister's rig, found 1,417 infected files.

Right click on your taskbar and pull up task manager, click on processes, sort by memory and find out what's eating up your memory.

Once you find out what it is, right click on it and kill the program. After that, figure out why / how it's loading and stop it from doing it.

If you cant figure it out, post a screen shot of the your running processes and we will be happy to try and assist.

Ran Malwarebytes and it came up clean. Tried the Task Manager and after 30 mins (yes I'm crawling along) it shows over 300 instances of a process called dsc.exe with the description SupportS... running. The other processes all seem to be ok, being related to Microsoft, McAfee, desktop etc. CPU usage is at 100%. Due to everything so slow its virtually impossible for me to do a screen capture. Using my wife's account, Task Manager processes do not show this dsc.exe file, and CPU usage is 5%. Looks like this dsc.exe may be the culprit.

In your case I believe DSC.exe would be Dell Support Center.

Have you tried restoring your computer with system restore, to an earlier time before this started?

Yes CarGuy, I did a system restore yesterday. It is Dell. The SupportS... is SupportSoft which relates to Dell.

Boot to safe mode and uninstall the dell support center. Then load your profile and see if the problem is gone.

Use a few of the malware removers mentioned above to make sure your system is clean and if you want, you can reinstall the latest version of the Dell Support Center from Dell.

Thanks CarGuy. I'll try that now.

Uninstalling the Dell software did the trick, all is running normally now. Think I'll leave it at that for a few days before reinstalling the Dell Support Centre. Many thanks CarGuy and everyone who took an interest and helped sort me out.

Glad to see you've got it resolved.  

Not without you guys. You guys are tops.

agreed

Yup, nice to see you were able to find the problem.

idk why but everytime ive ever made another user account my comp always lags...so i neveer make more than one account anyways..i feel it takes up too much of my space with duplicate files...try one account and folders for you and your wifes stuff

to CarsGuy!

I love a story with a happy ending.

Glad to see your problems are fixed. And yeah, malwarebytes is awesome.