Question : Problem: wmiprvse.exe taking 99% of CPU

Hi,

We've noticed recently that our computer will start running really slow and when we check Windows Task Manager, it always appears to be wmiprvse.exe.

We're currently running a Windows XP machine, stand alone, so there's no network or anything.  Does anyone have any idea what might be causing it to do this?  If it is of any use, we've noticed that it slows Firefox down a little bit (maybe about 5 seconds per page to load), but Internet Explorer gets completely slowed to a dead crawl (ie 3 minutes to open a webpage).

I've read some of the other questions on this topic, but couldn't really make head or tail of them. We've checked our anti-virus and it's not a virus.

Answer : Problem: wmiprvse.exe taking 99% of CPU

I'm not sure exactly how, but we rebooted the computer this morning and it now popped up with this box:

WMI has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience.

And that seems to have fixed the problem.  I'm not sure if WMI is important to the running of my machine, but until something breaks, I'll just leave it as it is for the moment.