regedt.exe killing my pc

[cpgoose]

Hello,

So my PC (1.6Ghz, Win2000), started running slowly all of a sudden
last week. Documents and programs will take a while to open, and will
also pause while I'm using them.

I stumbled on the Win2000 resource meter, and found my pc's
resources were up to 100%. Long story short, after killing off some
processes, and uninstalling some programs, I still had the same problemo.
Finally, I killed a process called "regedt.exe", and everything went back
to normal. Is this a virus or malware of some type?

Anyone else experience this?

[Craig Tucker]

You sure it was not regedit ? Regedit is the systems registry editor.

[cpgoose]

Yea, it was regedt.exe
I thought that was weird, too, that's why I thought it was malware or a
virus of somesort. I'm running a current version of Norton, though.

I did some research on regedt.exe, but haven't found much.

[sterno]

Well, there's a regedit.exe (new-style registry editor) and a regedt32.exe (old-style registry editor). I think regedt.exe is an even older registry editor from the 16-bit days, and you shouldn't normally be seeing it on a current version of Windows.

But none of those programs should normally be using any amount of CPU time unless you're searching registry keys or something like that.

[cpgoose]

yea, it's a (fairly) new pc. I was kind of doing process of elimination,
and killing off processes to see if the usage meter would drop. As soon
as I killed off regedt.exe, it dropped. The pc was absolutely fine the
whole rest of the day (and it's been like this for over a week). Although,
near the very end of the day, the usage went back to 100% even though
regedt.exe wasn't open. I rebooted, and closed regedt.exe again, and
everything was fine again. Grrr.

[zzyzzx]

Looks like a virus or trojan to me. I'd delete it and all references to it in my registry. The fact that it runs at startup only reinforces my belief.