Insight into the 'System' process running on my PC

[PackerFanatic]

So I am having some issues with my PC this morning...it has been really slow and laggy for me, so I popped open the Task Manager to see if something was running that was hogging up my CPU - and I find this process called 'System' (not to be confused with 'System Idle Process', which is a perfectly harmless "process") This one is just called 'System', run by username SYSTEM. And everytime I so much as move my mouse, it jumps up to 50%. If I open a folder or a program or a browser, it jumps to at least 50%, usually well over, most of the time near 100% (in turn making it near impossible to do anything on this machine)

I did a little bit of research into it, but most people are giving me mumbo-jumbo on System Idle Process, and the one decent article I found mentioned something about a device driver using the OS kernel which would be causing the system lag.

So has anyone had experience with this? I could probably just ask someone in my department (since I work in IS) but I was just curious if anyone has heard of this.

[Coffee Warlord]

Not to cause undue panic, but I'm fairly certain I've heard of a couple trojans that mask themselves as 'system'.

[PackerFanatic]

I saw that a couple of times too.

Things actually seem to be calming down...after pegging the PC at 100% usage for about 10 minutes (no apps open or anything), it has calmed down and I can do normal things (of course, this is after I already submitted a call to our help desk, heh)

I guess we will see.