Spinning cursor won't go away

Greetings,

I have an issue where the spinning blue circle that (I suppose) indicates the system is thinking shows up every 10 seconds or so, no matter what I'm doing. I was advised that McAfee antivirus was a likely culprit b/c it often doesn't play well with others. I uninstalled it and went with a freeware solution instead, but the issue remains. I will post what's happening in my Task manager (system):

taskeng
SearchIndexer
svchost
WmiPrvSE
SDUpdater
IAANTmon
SDUpdSvc
UpdaterService
syncagentsrv
SDFSSvc
GregHSRW
adcdpsrv
schedul2
spoolsv
AvastSvc
svchost
svchost
winlogon
lsm
lsass
services
csrss
wininit
csrss
svchost
smss
System
System Idle Process


My system idle process is at 98, which I understand is a good thing. Also, I read all about SearchIndexer and changed the settings so that there's no unneccessary drag on resources. Question: Is it normal to see processes duplicated like this?

My stats: Pentium Dual-Core E5500 2.8 Ghz, 6.00Gb Memory, Windows 7 Home 64-bit. I don't "do" much with the computer, the 1tb hdd is only about 10% used.

Many thanks for any suggestions.

Best Regards.

Have you checked your system for any Virus's and malware, spyware. Usually this is a good indicator of such issues. What 3rd party freeware Anti-Virus did you go with....the preferred is MSE?

Hi,

I'm using Avast. It says I'm clean, as did McAfee. I use Spybot for malware/spyware. Let me look at things again.

Josh