Annoying performance issue. When I’m typing in any application (browser, MS Word, notepad, anything) the system is VERY slow to echo the typed characters back to me on the screen.

It’s a less than 2-year old Dell Inspiron 1501 with a 1.6GHz AMD Turion64 X2 with 1GB RAM running Windows XP Media Center 2002 SP3. According to the Task Manager perf meter less than half the RAM is in use and CPU is <5% utilized. Minimal hard drive activity.

Trend Micro security software is up to date and comes back clean malware free. Additional freeware adware/spyware scanners report no issues. All Windows updates up to date. No recent config changes, app installs, etc. Video is an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 but I don’t think I should have to troubleshoot the hardware acceleration because everything was fine for so long. But obviously, something’s changed. My gut still tells me malware, maybe a keylogger, despite the clean bill of health from multiple security tools. If so, other ways to detect?

I also thought of dust buildup (seen that cause perf issues before on OLD machines) and I haven’t opened it up (yet) but I’m sure it’s very clean, dust free.

What are your thoughts, things to try? Thanks.
Thanks for the suggestions on registry cleaning, I considered that as well, but I’ve got the problem corrected, turns out that disabling the ATI hotkey poller service corrects the issue.