Hi,
I am running sygate personal firewall at home and have been for 18 months or so. Every few days or so the CPU jumps to 100% and stays there. This only happens when the PC was left alone for a while, but not every time you leave it for a while. I have been reading a few posts of people with similar problems but have not found an answer yet.
Looking at the task manager I can see that smc.exe takes up 99-100% of CPU and according to my temperature meter the cpu is burning hot and have been for ages. Initially I thought it was the HD or network card going into sleep mode, so I disabled the sleep mode function on both of them. This didn't work. If I cant find a solution soon I am going back to Zone Alarm, it might be a dog but at least it won't fry my CPU.
I also know I don't have a virus and run Ad-aware all the time (both in normal windows and safe mode to be extra safe). I am running XP Pro SP2, this was happening before SP2 though.
Has anyone experienced a similar problem or does anyone have anything that I could try because I'm tearing my hair out...