Omg.. My specs in my sig are totally outdated..

Have you updated all of your drivers - especially the via 4-in-1's? Let us know what drivers you are using for everything, and we can take a closer look...

I've upgraded all my hardware drivers, to no avail..

Try the VIA PCI Latency Patch it boosted my chipset performance under XP by roughly 20 FPS in Quake 3. Go to http://www.viahardware.com
 
http://download.viahardware.com/vlatency_v019.zip

try a p4 runs 99 percent free at idle in XP on P4S333 Asus 1.6a at 2.24ghz...

Theelviscerator: Like I'd really pay $500 for an inferior processor..
 
pmistry: I've got the patch, but sadly it doesn't help my problem

Im not in front of my XP Box so I can verify what I'm saying, but here we goes.
Go into the registry and search for explorer.exe , check the instances you find, and make sure nothing else is bound to it.
check in msconfig also.
I had a problem similar where some bodgy advertising software was linking to explorer.exe and hogging memory.
I cant remember what its called, might be wowexec.exe
Also, control+alt+delete in processes and see if wowexec.exe is running, kill it if it is.
 
- daniel.

Hate to break it, but wowexec is the Win16 application launcher in 2000/XP (i.e., if you run a win16 app in 2000/XP, it actually runs as a child process of wowexec (which runs as a child process of ntvdm, the NT virtual DOS process)). Sometimes it gets left around, so it should be safe to kill, but probably isn't the source of your problem.

I've got nothing loading with Windows at startup, and as little as possible in services. This isn't a software issue, because I've reformatted my system, and explorer still takes up lots of CPU power, and lots of RAM.. At first, just around 10mb, but it grows as you have windows on your drive. Maybe it's a memory leak?

thewizard75 yep my mistake, as I said I'm at work and not in front of my XP Box =)
The program is actually called OPENME.EXE not wowexec. It produces an error when shutting down the PC that says 'Waiting for HTML Package to close'
But MyNaMeIsRaGe didn't mention anything like that, so I'm probable still offtrack.

First post in a long while. let me preface this by saying that I have a long history with Windows NT going back to NT 3.5-3.51. I did some beta testing for NT 4.0 as well as Windows 2000.
NT has been my primary operating system for years. I have studied tweak after tweak, implementing those that seemed beneficial, have always kept up with latest drivers, service packs, regular defrag .... etc.
Since installing XP and tweaking the hell out of it, I've come to the conclusion that it is a resource hog, requiring much more ram and a faster processor. I have two identical computers one with XPpro the other with 2000pro- same processor(Athlon T-bird)/ram(512 of cas2 Micron) and HD and virtually identical software. The XP machine gobbles up much more ram and system resources doing identical tasks. Not presenting myself as some sort of expert, I am not. but hoping that service pack 1 for XP will address some of the bloat that seems to bog down. Better drivers, memory leaks? who knows. I only know what I experience on a daily basis. That's my two cents worth

MyNameIsRaGe: (I'm at work, my specs. in the signature don't apply here, indeed I use an old P///450-256Mo pc100-HD 5400rpm)
-> your problem is weird, for me at least, explorer.exe takes between 0 & 1 cpu time at idle, not much more when numerous windows and progs. opened. Before I changed explorer.exe level priority, it took between 10 & 15 megs. of ram, now it takes 15-21 megs just because I set its priority to above normal due to an issue (with Kaspersky Antivirus Personal Pro 4.x freezing my desktop on startup) I solved this way.
Did you checked the priority level of your explorer.exe ?

I usually set the priority level of explorer.exe, to low.. That's the only way I can get games to run without skipping.

Does this do the same thing with your chip clock at spec.?

Yes..