wmiprvse.exe
My nephew’s PC was having troubles with wmiprvse.exe using up 100% of the available CPU cycles.
I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting this issue — only to discover that this is a known issue with a known fix.
The fix is to update to the latest patches from Microsoft. I would point to a specific patch, but the patches are different for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, etc…
wmiprvse.exe problems can also be related to malware issues, but that wasn’t the case on Tommy’s PC.