wmiprvse.exe takes ~70% of CPU (or more)

Hello,

Not sure if this is a malware issue, or just an Office thing, so I figured I'd ask here first, and then tackle it as malwere if necessary....

First of all I got an error "Outlook has a registry extension error". Not sure exactly the meaning of that. But, now anytime I launch Word, Excel, or Outlook (I assume Power Point too, but I've not tried), the computer locks up (or else it is so excrutiatingly slow that it seems locked up - sometimes I can get a Task Manager window up). The CPU "graph" in the tray (from Task Manager) indicates 100% CPU in this state (a big green square). Even when I haven't launched an Office application, I see (from Task Manager) that one process, wmiprvse.exe, is taking up at least 70% of the CPU (often more).

I tried a "Repair" option from the Office 2003 Pro installation disk, it was unable to complete. For some reason I suspected that maybe Norton 2006 Security Suite might be interfering (it interferes with lots of things, it seems), so I removed it, just to see if that helped. It didn't, so I reinstalled it. I made backups of my .pst files for Outlook, and then removed and reinstalled Office. No help. I obtained all office updates from the Microsoft site - no change.

Does anyone know what this wmiprvse.exe process is, and why it seems to be eating up the CPU? Has anyone seen this sort of behavior? I tried a NAV scan, it turned up nothing. Also Spybot and Ad-Aware are clean.

Thanks for any insights.
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Spy Hunter