WinXP Home - Virus?

I have a computer that is behaving very badly right now. Explorer.exe takes up as much CPU as it can (up to 99%), and nothing shows up under any virus or malware scan (I've tried Norton, Microsoft AntiSpyware, Ad Aware, Spybot, and now I am trying housecall from Trend Micro). I can get into safe mode, but can't do much while there as explorer.exe will not load, and neither will sfc.exe. I'm just getting ready to backup everything and flatten the computer, but I am loathe to do this as it will take forever with explorer behaving like it is. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Knight3058

What happens when you boot into safemode? Does the problem go away?
When did this start happening?
When Windows boots does explorer.exe always take up 99% of the CPU?
Are you fully patched?
Give us the CPU and RAM specs.

Check your printer queue and make sure it is empty. If you have failed or stalled print jobs this can occur.

What is your PF usage like?
also you might want to go to services.msc and msconfig and look at all the start up services you have running because even though they are not showing up in taskmanager doesn't mean they;re running. most of the time hidden services run with explorer.exe.

check them and if you find an ass load of them then that might be the problem. Also, you might want to go ahead and disable you indexing service too, because that can run explorer up esspeacially if you have a LOADED HDD.

Ok, here are the specs:
Athlon 64 3300+
512 Mb
250 GB HDD (80% free)
Radeon 9600XT 128 MB.

As I said, explorer.exe will not load in safe mode, safe mode loads, but will not load explorer.exe.

I'll check that services.msc for something.

Knight3058

I found this entry in the services section,
MSSQL$MICROSOFTBCM
anyone know what this is?

A quick Google search brought up this on the MSSQL$MICROSOFTBCM: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=828246

As to your Explorer.exe problem here is a link to MS suggesting Service Pack update: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;317751

and here is a link to a thread with 3 different fixes: http://www.devhood.com/Messages/message_view-2.aspx?thread_id=41289

Just for some more info, this system is fully updated at SP2 with all patches that I can get. So the service pack option is a no go. I'll try deleting index.dat and see if that works.