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This was a great analysis for Windows 7, however, with XP I have seen a lot of “99%” usage with MSE starting between 1 minute and 5 minutes AFTER you log into the system. It comes up fine, but then for about 5 minutes the process takes all the CPU and you can’t do much of anything on the system. This has been seen on several different systems (One laptop and several desktops). Performance is worse on systems with less RAM as might be expected, but even on a 2 GigByte XP system it slows down.

Note1: MSE settings are to not use more than 50% of CPU during scan, but this is not during a scan, it is after a reboot.

Note2: If MSE has not been updated for a while this may not start until 5-10 minutes after update, timing is not consistent.

Note3: I still use MSE on several systems, it seems to work well once it gets past a few minutes of hogging the CPU.

The attached task manager picture is from a P4-2.8GHz upgraded with 2 gig RAM and shows the engine consuming CPU resources. (MS isn’t the only one with problems like this, Secunda’s psia.exe does the same on occasion, but doesn’t appear to do it on every reboot).

30097-MsMpEng.exe_