It all started when I turned on my Acer 3005 laptop one morning. It booted up came to the Windows XP Home login screen. I tried to click on my username only to discover the touchpad was unresponsive. I mistakenly thought that it was "frozen" at this screen, because I neither the keyboard nor the mouse seemed to be responding. It finally occured to me to try plugging in a mouse to see if that helped. The usb mouse worked. I was able to use the mouse again, and everything seemed fine.

Days later, the keyboard suddenly became unresponsive as well. I waited it out, and the keyboard seemed to resolve itself. Then, it came back... It is now intermentantly unresponsive/slow. Sometimes it is just a delay, or it will skip letters, other times it is 100% unresponsive, and yet at other times (like now) it is fine. 100% responsive/acurate.

Meanwhile, I realized that the CPU is running nearly constantly. The usage % rarely drops below 66% (with it running at 80-99% much of the time). This is true even when I manualy shut down/disable all non-essential start up programs.
It really "Feels" like a virus/trojen, but all scans come up clean.
Things I have done:
AVG- current and ran daily.
Symantec- ran online scan with clean results
Trendmicro House Call- ran online scan with only results being a suggestion to make a few updates to windows, which I did.
AdAware- only found usual minor suspects
Spybot- ""
Ununstalled anything recenty installed except for the program "Tunebite" which I downloaded recently (paid software, hate to uninstall this... did lots of research before & after... doesn't seem to be the problem.)
CWShredder- found nothing, and then used it to clean up history, temp files, recycle bin, cookies, offline content, etc...
Ran Disk Cleanup.
Defrag- Says it is unnessasary... I just ran this about 3 weeks ago (about 1 week before problem occured)
AboutBuster- ran in safemode twice and had it come up with nothing except that afterwards I recieved this runtime error:
Runtime error '339'
Component 'comctl32.ocx' or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid.
(honestly, I have NO idea what to do/think about that)
Varified Startup Process... all seem to be legit.

Hmm... posting this I realized I skipped running Windows Memory Diagnostic. You'll think I should do that now?

I am simply at a loss, and at wits end. I hope I got everything in here... while the keyboard is working.
And... just in case it could be related in anyway, the powercord recently began failing. We are currently using a loner, while the original is being repaired. I really don't think it has made a difference. At first I did. The computer worked really well the first night of using it with the new cord. The next morning, it was story as usual, so I think it was just a coincidence.

Hopefully & Greatfully,
Marblessed

One more scan item,perhaps the registry is bloated. Run this from MSFT
Click ONLY on the gray box that says 'Full Service Scan" below the wrench image

http://safety.live.com/site/en-us/default

Thank you, however I tried to run WindowsLiveOneCare, but it kept comming up with error # 0X0C600C04, and refered me to their forum for help, which seems to be a bit of a joke. Lots of posts regarding this error, very little "answers." I tried the only "solution" I could find, but to no avail.
Any other thoughts?

Man this is a tough one. I'm still looking at the error
two other ideas tho'
1 another malware scan this is a good product
Use the free Home user scan

http://www.superantispyware.com/

A memory test

http://www.memtest86.com/

First do this

Solution: Download http://www.malwarebytes.org/libraries/COMCTL32.OCX

Copy it into your system folder:

C:\Windows\System32

Register it by going to Start | Run then copy and paste the following line:

regsvr32 \windows\system32\comctl32.ocx

and see whether the message popsup again