"Big Bob Smith" <YouCantHandleTheTruth@nonya.net> wrote in message 
news:j9ps62lur2lrko4vqrt64k4arog9mo0ckp@4ax.com...

On Fri, 19 May 2006 22:14:36 GMT, f/fgeorge <ffgeorge@yourplace.com>
wrote:

On Fri, 19 May 2006 10:31:42 -0400, Big Bob Smith
<YouCantHandleTheTruth@nonya.net> wrote:

Howdy All

I've run into a bit of a puzzler when running BOINC on one of my home
PCs. The problem/symptons as follows - hope someone has seen something
like this before and has a solution.

This PC is a 2G Pentium 4 with 2G of RAM....it has been running Seti
and BOINC for over 3 years without incident. In the last 3 months when
running BOINC ..the BOINC process shoots up to the "normal" 97-99% of
CPU useage and stays there ..for about 2 minutes. At about 2 minutes
in the "System" process in Task Manager starts up (it normally is 2%
or less) and runs steadily @ 50% of CPU - but only while BOINC is
running.........shut off BOINC and it drops back to under 2%.....

50% of the cpu would indicate that you have HT or even a dual core and
the second core or the HT part is not now crunching. If you have
either a dual core or HT check your Boinc settings and make sure they
are set to allow 2 cpus, at least, to bring it up to 100%.

Well it cant be that ......forgot to mention I'm running Windows
2000......so HT isnt enabled. So far it has me stumped....

Double check that HT is disabled in BIOS just to be sure.  Also, how much 
memory do you have and what BOINC apps are you running?  Perhaps you are low 
on memory and the system starts paging like mad.  Check the memory usage of 
the BOINC apps.  Perhaps a broken BOINC app with a memory leak?