iexplore, etc.

Am new to this forum and not sure where/how to start.

Old lady, old Dell, old Juno. Love my old XP but missed getting SP 3 installed, dagnabbit.
Oh well.

Problem is that I told my guru that the machine was s l o w. He went to Task Manager and discovered that I had some interesting processes showing. One was iexplore.exe which often indicates mem usage of over 350,000. Internet explorer was not even running. Likewise, I get explorer.exe and exec.exe, both of which show large usages - like over 10,000.

I can select iexplore and then end process. I can R-click it and end process tree.

What the heck are these things?
Sandy

 

iexplore.exe shows up in task manager when you have IE open and it will show up for each tab you have open in IE.

therefore you are infected and probably very severely, you should wipe your entire drive and reinstall xp, or at least download malwarebytes free and run until all infections have been cleared but this will probably cause lots of inop programs on your pc as they are infected also.

https://www.malwarebytes.org/mwb-download/
above is the site to download the FREE malware scanner,

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However, since you are severely out of date as far as security updates and sp3, I do not believe that this will do any good.

install SP3 by downloading and running from...
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24
…you can ignore the text that says that it is for network installations and also ignore the text advising Windows/Microsoft Update if only updating one PC.
Reboot twice after installing.

then after installing sp3 go to microsoft updates and get all the updates necessary to be fully updated, and then install firefox or chrome and do not use IE.