idling at 35%

Having just taken possession of this Presario 5000 with a Duron 800 and
running ME, I came across a web forum post where somebody was complaining
about how slow his similar machine was.

So I started up System Monitor and discovered that at idle, the cpu usage was
a whopping 35%. The machine was not even online at the time. So, using Task
Monitor, I closed out the bunch of programs had been started at bootup (I
assume most/all were by Comapq's default configuration). The cpu usage
actually went *up* to near 50%.

Any ideas on what is going on? Is it Win ME? My 500Mhz K6 running '98 idles
below 10%, and when online (with a winmodem) I am at under 20%. Thanks.