Hi, thanks for being here. I recently had a spyware infection and cleaned up with spybot search&destroy. Everything was almost back to normal and then I dumped the recycler. Then it slowed way down and said windows is increasing the virtual memory. It has been working steadily for two days and I'm pretty sure it isn't going to stop. What to do? I can boot in safe mode and it stops chewing, and I can do some things, but very slow. I need to get this fixed because it is screwing up my business, but can't really afford to pay for tech help right now. Help?
Thanks, David

Can you explain what you mean by this "I can boot in safe mode and it stops chewing,"

1) How full is your hard drive, you need at least a 1/4 of the drive empty for windows to use.
1a) If the drive is nearly full put so data on disk or uninstall some programs.
1b) Have a second drive fitted, hard drives are very cheap.
1c) One other thing I do, is to clean out all my temp-files.
Go through all your disk, put a short cut to a new folder on the desk top then it takes two minutes to clean out the lot and what a lot of rubbish you will find.

2) Go into Start / Run / Msconfig / Start-up and untick programs that need not start at boot-up, save memory. Programs like Office, Printer software etc, but leave programs like; AVG software, Firewall, Spyware software, Windows software. Careful only untick 2 programs at once, keep a record, if you have problems starting up you can go into safe mode and retick them

3) When was the last time you did a defrag, if you have Norton System Works use Speed Disk.

Hope this helps Old-un

Welcome to techhelpforum.

"It has been working steadily for two days and I'm pretty sure it isn't going to stop."

And; "I can boot in safe mode and it stops chewing..."

Can you clarify a bit more what you mean by this? Are there system messages indicating a certain activity?

Is the Indexing Service running? (Start, Run, services.msc - Is Indexing Service set to AUTOMATIC or MANUAL?)

"I dumped the recycler"

Do you mean you deleted the file(s) in C:\RECYCLER?

C:\RECYCLER is not the same as the Recycle Bin. This is C:\RECYCLED.