Trying to determine if my winlogon.exe is a virus...

Hi, I've occasionally been noticing winlogon.exe taking up 50% of my cpu and I'm not sure why... I googled it and saw it was a virus in some cases but in other cases it's legitimate. I ended the process once when it was at 50% and it made windows shut down. The odd thing is that it only spikes like this every once in a while... sometimes if I shut down and restart it'll stop and winlogon will disappear or not be using 50% cpu. I'm currently using avast, adaware and spybot... they all came up with nothing in the scans. So I searched my computer for instances of winlogon.exe (its in all lowercase, which one site on google said is a possible virus)
There are three instances and all show up clean by avast when scanned:
1. WINLOGON in: C:\i386 255kb EX_File
2. winlogon in C:\Windows\system32 491kb Application and the icon is a window with a moon in it (the other two have the default nondescript icon)
3. winlogon.dmp in C:\Program Files\Thinkpad\ConnectUtilities 84kb DMP file


I am using a thinkpad t60p from lenovo, and running windows XP SP2. Before anyone says anything I'm aware I should get a better firewall and I keep putting it off because of my classes being insane. I've been recommended Comodo as being the best free one so I will be getting that as soon as this problem is rectified. If there are better free antivirus and spyware you could reccommend that'd be fine too (as you may not be able to tell, I'm a college student, money is tight for me, and my degree, Industrial Design isn't exactly the cheapest, the laptop I'm using was very expensive in order to run our 3d modelers, etc.) I can't afford to lose this laptop or have it down or at the factory without falling very behind on my classes.

I hope someone can help, I've come to majorgeeks before when I've had other issues, or just needed advice/recommendations, and I know what a great commmunity is here. I look forward to talking with you all to help me fix/ determine if this is a problem.