A few weeks ago our computer began to 'freeze' for no apparent reason. During the freeze the cursor can be moved but apart from that all function comes to a halt whilst the hard drive can be heard whirring away. The freeze might not kick in for half an hour, or more, but when it does the intermittent freezes, lasting anything between 1-5 minutes, cause the system to become virtually unusable. A Malwarebytes scan threw up four PUP Installer IB items, which I thought might be the cause, but after removing them the problem persisted. Then I thought it might be the Kodak printer software as the System Tray Kodak icon would turn black each time the freeze occurred. But what I've learned is that when I open Task Manager during the freeze, there are two entries called 'explorer.ie' which, together are using 100% of the CPU. The curious thing is that not only are these entries not present in the TM when the system is running smoothly but, assuming these two processes represent Internet Explorer, we have never used IE, preferring Firefox, and so never open IE at all. Could someone shed some light on what's going on and how I might deal with it? I've thought of simply ticking the boxes in the TM and 'ending' these two processes to see if that cures the problem but am not sure if this will do some damage as I don't normally tinker with the TM. Given that we never use IE, is it (a) possible to remove it without affecting other parts of the system and (b) would it cure the problem? Thanks, everyone! David
