>>Well, I don't know all of what this thing is used for. I just wanted to find out what was sucking the CPU cycles and stop it. When I have time ( when do I ever have time? :-) ) I'll look at it and see what it's for exactly.
>
>Ok, I was just wondering why anyone would want that. No big deal, don't go out of your way or anything.
>
>Thanks.

For those interested

My problem:

Killing rc5des.exe has put my CPU back to its nice normal state. At this point I don't know if this exe had anything to do with my web server/COM servers hanging so I'm gonna run it for awhile with rc5des.exe not running and watch it to see.

rc5des.exe:

Some of you might find this interesting. Reading its Help file indicated it is a client that is part of distributed.net. You can find out all about it at http://www.distributed.net. Essentially, they are "experimenting" with distributed computing in the literal sense ( they also appear to be in for the money :-) ). You install their client (rc5des.exe) and when they need computing power they use your machine's CPU cycles to do some of their computing thus making all client computers part of one huge computer. ( If any of you are original Star Trek fans, it's reminiscent of the space critter in "Operation Annihilate" whose pieces were'nt connected but acted as a whole, drew strength from the whole, etc. :-) ). Presumably if something on your machine needs its CPU cycles, rc5des.exe voluntarly gives up its turn. I'm out of my element here, but apparently NT has some sort of null usage entity ( for lack of the actual term which I don't know ) which on a normal machine does basically nothing when CPU cycles are not being consumed. It seems rc5des.exe takes this entity's place so instead of no CPU usage, it sucks all CPU usage until it's needed by another application.

I would be very interested to hear you all's thoughts on this and to correct me on any of the items I am in error on.