Houston,

>I’m amazed that nobody pointed out some of the basics – clock cycles not used by any process are used by the System Idle Process. So to answer your question a Fox process using 100% of the available clock cycles should have zero effect on the temperature of the CPU

I don't think that statement is correct. There is a huge difference between the system sitting idle as far as the O/S is concerned and a program like VFP sitting in an infinite loop. Run both on a notebook. With VFP running full bore your fan will come on pretty quickly. Sitting there with nothing but the O/S running and the fan won't run. So that tells me the O/S has a low CPU use way of wasting idle cycles. I'm pretty sure the same thing can be proved on a desktop machine if you want to attach a temperature probe to your CPU to monitor it.