Firefox is acting up in some odd way.
With only six or eight tabs open, it becomes a massive CPU hog. Closing and relaunching FF seems to help for a while, but then after a while it gets silly again.
(I update and run my anti-spyware and anti-virus stuff every day, so I doubt that is the problem.)
Sounds like one of the web pages you have open is doing that. Try closing one at a time and watch the CPU meter for a while to see if you have caught the offender.
Thanks. That was my first thought as well.
When it first started, I was on two all-text sites plus this site. I then wanted to blame some Windows background service, but when I looked at CPU usage it was bouncing near one hundred percent at the FF report with nothing else running. I then closed all tabs down one at a time as you suggested and only the google homepage was open. One hundred percent CPU, still.
I closed FF and CPU duties went to zero.
Relaunched FF and the issue seemed gone, but it came back twice. One time I had no other sites loaded but this one and this site is usually easy to navigate, even with my extremely slow ISP.
(The ISP software is also a likely culprit anytime anything happens - more so than WinXP to be honest - because they cache pages I visit regularly on my machine to increase page load speeds, but they can't hide that. It is obvious when cached pages are being updated)
Anyway, I hope it was a fluke.