Using Task Manager and viewing the Processes Tab, I determined that the culprit was an entry for svchost.exe. Unfortunately this particular program is responsible for running the various services that Windows uses in the background. There were 4 instances of svchost.exe and no way in Task Manager to determine the one service that was running out of control.
After a short search on the web, I found a free program from Windows sysinternals called processor explorer.
This is a tiny utility 1.6MB that needs no installing and displays all the processes that are currently running. It gives you tons of info about how much cpu time, memory and I/O each process is using.
When it came to the offending svchost.exe I was able to further explore by double-clicking on the process. This gave me a window that listed all the services running under its control. There was a list of about 20. I proceeded to 'Kill' each service, keeping an eye on the cpu usage graph. When I came to Network Connection Manager the cpu dropped to zero even though it said it had trouble stopping it.
So now I knew which service was responsible I went into Services from the Adminstrative Tools applet in Control Panel, found Network Connection Manager and disabled it.
After restarting the computer the cpu usage was sitting where I would expect at between 1% and 2%. I then manually started the offending service which seemed to start correctly and the cpu usage remained around the 1% mark from then on. I will see what happens when I restart at a later date as I still haven't got to the bottom of the problem but at least my computer is running a lot faster!.
I have since restarted the computer several times and the problem has gone!
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