Since last night, my computer has been showing iexplore.exe up to 95% CPU usage. I cannot end the process. After shutdown and/or restart, it comes back and nothing is responding. I see no sign of it on the startup program list. Just now, it is showing as IEXPLORE.EXE, rather than lower case. I am running XP and using firefox.
Any ideas how to stop it? It has taken over 10 minutes just to load this page and write this question.
update:
without my doing anything, the problem appears to have resolved itself. No more iexplore.exe tying up the CPU. Ran Malwarebytes antimalware - nothing serious detected.
Still unable to boot in safe mode, though. Otherwise, everything seems OK.