While running a larger program the other day I noticed some extremely laggy behavior. At first I just thought this was due to a complicated movie that I was editing, but a quick check of the process list showed that there was an iexplore.exe process consuming a huge amount of memory. The part that confused me was that I was not even running internet explorer, and when I ended this process, it ran again instantly and quickely built up to over 120,000 k of memory usage.

Even after restarting several times, this process seems to be constantly running on my computer. Any ideas on how to keep it from running? Or at least to decrease its memory usage?

My first instinct has got to be spyware, get ad-aware, xoftspy or the dozen other anti-spyware programs available. A lot of spyware or viruses display as iexplorer.exe on the processes list to confuse a more advanced user.