One cause of this, at least in my case, is a bug (malware) called Trojan.Inject.bw. I got it from a P2P download (ya I know i'm bad!). It puts a file called windows.exe in your \system32 directory. Windows.exe is launched on startup and creates/starts a process with a random name (very hard to track down!).
The best way to catch it is to run a scanner in safe mode. That way the windows.exe can't launch and create an un-findable process. I use AVG Anti-Spyware.
Don't jump the gun and delete \system32\windows.exe. Because it is contained in the Windows startup section of the registry, who knows what it will do if it is deleted and can't be found on Windows startup.
Because I had a good idea what caused the issue, I just did a scan on the single file with great results. A full scan would have taken like 2 hrs.
The best way to catch it is to run a scanner in safe mode. That way the windows.exe can't launch and create an un-findable process. I use AVG Anti-Spyware.
Don't jump the gun and delete \system32\windows.exe. Because it is contained in the Windows startup section of the registry, who knows what it will do if it is deleted and can't be found on Windows startup.
Because I had a good idea what caused the issue, I just did a scan on the single file with great results. A full scan would have taken like 2 hrs.