Flash runs REALLY slow

I often play flash games on the internet and i frequently find that after 10-15min of playing the CPU usage jumps from ~50% to 100%. The game is fine for the first 10min but then it jumps to 100% CPU until i switch to another application window which is maximised and the CPU drops to 5-10%, i assume because it isn't rendering the game (but it's still running in the background). Then a few minutes after i switch back it happens again, and occurs more and more frequently. Here is a screenshot of the CPU usage:

I have drawn a red line indicating the average CPU usage when the game is running, the jump to 100%, down to ~5% when the game goes to the background, and finally back up to normal game CPU usage.
Memory does not seem to increase so it's not a memory leak, and it happens when i run games in Firefox, Opera and IE7. The same thing happens with all flash games so it's probably a Flash's fault not the game programmer's.
I have a laptop, Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz, 1.5Gb RAM.

As a computer programmer i (obviously) have some insight into how computers work and although i do not know how Flash works i could made some educated guesses as to what might be going on under the covers. Well the only thing i could think of is either the programmer is really stupid and uses a very inefficient algorithm for something (as i mentioned previously), or Flash is doing something really stupid like creating a new image object at a different x,y position every time the image is moved.
Well here is proof that i am (sadly) right. I was just browsing on GameDev.net and i found this post:

So, what do you think? How many other people are having this problem, and is the above quote the actual cause or is it something else? And, or course, can i do anything to fix it?

 

There may also be some process running from Task Scheduler, you should be able to check this from the control Panel.

There's a great IE/Flash troubleshooting session recounted in Mark's Blog, the tools he used (he also wrote them) are here.

 

@Halo: My OS is Windows XP SP3 and as up-to-date as i know of.
What are these "exploits" you are talking about? Like a virus or something? I have been having this problem for over a year now and i updated to the latest Flash version (10 i think) quite a while ago but it didn't fix anything.
I will try that uninstaller tool and clean out the registry then reinstall Flash, hopefully that will help. I used CCleaner before but i did not know it was free, when i used it i could only fix ~6 issues then it told me to buy the full version (at least i think that was CCleaner).
Oh, and my antivirus is Norton. I will try disabling it and see if that makes any difference, although i am not sure it is the problem (i wouldn't be surprised though, it likes to scan everything excessively).

@satrow: thanks for the link, i will have a read of it. And i already have the Sysinternals utilities but thanks for that link too

 

Nope, reinstalling didn't help
I tried playing a simple flash game (Rustyard from Nitrome) and CPU jumped about a minute after i started playing and the frame rate dropped to about 3-5fps.
Here is another screenshot just to emphasise how much of a problem this is:

The game is just a simple 2D game with no special effects other than the scrolling transparent fog in the background, it would fun better in a Java applet yet it absolutely cripples Flash.
Unfortunately it seems to be a bug which Adobe probably see as a minor, low priority issue because most people these days have a dual-core machine and won't notice it. That is no excuse to ignore it and allow a perfectly good ~3 year old laptop to run like it is 10 years old! It looks like the only way i am going to resolve this issue is to buy a new computer.

 

Hi again. This is kind of an old thread by now but i just want to point out something that just happened to me. I was watching a video in Flash, which was not surprisingly using 100% CPU, and within 2 minutes my laptop over-heated and shut down. Now that's just how bad Flash is. Ok, so my Toshiba Satellite has over-heating problems, but that should not stop me from watching more than 2 minutes of a roughly 600x400 resolution video.
[/rant]