System Restore.

So, I replaced my hard drive and upgraded the memory on my 5 year old desktop a few months ago. I did this primarily because I got tired of having to use an external drive to store all of my music; the new HD has 400 GB of space which is more than enough to store all of my stuff. Unfortunately, I use iTunes to manage all of my music and it has on occasion taken a seemingly long time to open the program and load my 200 GB music library.

A couple of weeks ago, I opened iTunes and the progress bar popped up stating that it was checking my library. This process took 5 minutes and the program took another 5 minutes to load my library.

I looked at my task manager and the cpu useage was at or near 100%; the usage has stayed at that level ever since that day.

So, I assume I picked up something. However, none of the programs that I use or have used (spybot; avast, AVG, Ad Aware) have detected anything. The speed of my desktop is driving me nuts and I am very close to just saying "screw it" and doing a system restore.

The problem is that I have never done one before; is it just as easy as using the included recovery disc? Would doing a system restore be an unecessary action to take. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have 10 svchost.exe listings on the Task Manager as well as 2 seperate iexplore.exe listings when I use Internet Explorer.

There are a total of 40 processes running at this moment.

One of the svchosts is using upwards of 60,000 K but most of the others are using around 30,000 K.

One of the iexplorer listings is using 138,000 K while the other one is using 56,000 K.
But I also have around 15 other listings that are using at least 30,000 K.

I'm not the savviest computer guy but that just seems excessive.

None of the processes are really high, just your aforementioned Idling processes.

The CPU usage looks to be hovering around 5-10% and jumps up to 100% every once in a while.

When iTunes is open and playing a track, the CPU usage shifts between 60 and 99. When a track is playing, the computer becomes virtually unuseable.

I am using XP and I was possibly thinking about upgrading to Windows 7 (I think I am still eligible for the college student price). But like I said, its a 5 year old computer and its max memory is 1 GB.

As far as the HD, I regretted not partitioning the thing the instant after I loaded all of my music onto it. Do you think a 122/250 partition would work or would 250 be too large to manage?

So, I am going to bite the bullet in the next few days and start from scratch.

Is it necessary to partition the hard drive first and go from there or should I start to delete stuff, reformat, use the recovery disc and then partition the drive?

And thanks to all that have given me advice on the matter.