I did Kress computer battle last night and tonight against the evil Morpheus program and various other evil programs it managed to snake onto the system.
 
Finally, right as I began to despair at 8:15 pm, I fixed the Kresses’ computer! Thank you, Jesus. :)
 
For posterity and future reference, Zone Alarm, a software firewall, was taking up 100% of the cpu (pegging the processor) for long periods of time and for no apparent reason. The process actually taking up the cpu is called vsmon.exe, which is the Zone Alarm process.
 
Morpheus 5.1 would not uninstall itself due to either incompetence on the part of its developers or their malice (take your pick), so I manually deleted the Program Files\Morpheus directory and the Program Files\Streamcast directory. Even after doing this, the vsmon.exe still hogged the cpu and made the computer virtually unusable. My only guess was that somehow the Kresses IP address had been registered with the evil Morpheus servers and so was made available to countless other computers running the program, and they were trying to download files from it.
 
But I inspected the system and the socket connections (using TCPView from sysinternals.com), and I couldn’t see anything suspect. As a last ditch effort, I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, then redownloaded the latest version and installed it, and it worked! Vsmon.exe quit taking up all the cpu.
 
Moral of the story: Don’t install peer-to-peer file-sharing software–it’s like installing a pipe directly from the sewer into your living room and pumping in raw sludge.

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