I always thought programs like that would be useless in 2000 or XP since the OS has the system idle process that is supposed to do the same thing. Well, for my particular motherboard at least (A7M266) ...

So what's likely the cause of such behavior? A bad driver? Any way to find out which? Clearly, based on how sluggish my system is the CPU is at 65% even though the process window shows only the idle ...