[jughead]

We have an HP Pavilion ze4400 with an AMD Athlon XP2200+ with 448 MB RAM. We are running indows XP.
The laptop runs normally exept when we open a browser, IE8 or Firefox. The CPU goes to 100% and the computer slows to a crawl. Downloads work normally. We have scanned with Norton Antivirus, Spybot, and Yahoo Antispy. All come up clean. We have optimized, defragged, windoctored and diskdoctored. I have reviewed the tasklist and found nothing unusual.
The last thing downloaded was Adobe Reader 9.1 which we have since uninstalled. We have upgraded from IE 7 to 8 and reinstalled Firefox. I have disabled the indexing service. Nothing so far has helped.
The avaliable memory rarely goes below 100 MB. The computer does not seem to be overheating.
Could it be malware or a virus or somethng else altogether. Our next step is to refomat the disk and reinstall windows but we want to see if there is another solution first.