I've had this happen several times and a restart usually fixes it. Tonight it happened again and I decided to see if I could find out exactly what might be causing it and if there was anything useful on the matter on the Intarwebs.

Unfortunately, the Intarwebs has failed me yet again.. it was the same old thing: "Dudes! My junk is causing problems!" Everyone else: "I know, dude! My junk has the exact same problem!"

Everyone has the same problem, but no one has a solution. Well, I used Process Explorer and found that the entry named "Interrupts" was using a ridiculous amount of resources. It was actually causing my mouse to jitter on the rate of about once a second for about ¼ of a second in addition to most other major process on the system (3D rendering).

So using the trusty Event Viewer (Start->Run->eventvwr.msc-><enter>) and checking the "System" log, turns out I was getting device access errors on my CD-ROM to about the tune of 1 per second - imagine that. Disabling the device using Device Manager cleared the problem right up. I wasn't, unfortunately, able to re-enable it. So I just restarted the system (surprise!).

So as a solution to the problem of the hardware interrupts process of Windows consuming too many resources, check your event logs with event viewer for errors, they're likely to show up. If you can get by with disabling the device until it can be replaced or troubleshot, that'll alleviate your resource consumption.

There you have it, possibly the first answer to this issue the Intarwebs has ever seen!

-Some Rando