Coming out of standby sometimes my XP SP3 machine “stutters” with high CPU

Question

I've got an XP SP3 machine with an odd problem when coming out of standby sometimes. After starting back up the machine will rhythmically stutter at a fixed interval with one of my four cores pegged at 100% during this time. Also, if my speakers are on, I will hear a high frequency hum during the stuttering.

A look at Task Manager shows no tasks taking any CPU time, but it does report 25% Kernel Time during the stuttering. A look at Process Explorer shows no tasks taking CPU, except Hardware Interrupts are the culprit during the stuttering.

Machine was last known not to do this about 2 months ago before I moved. Since then there have been a few driver updates and patches installed. I recently installed a Wacom Bamboo Tablet, however, uninstalling this device and driver did not change anything. I've also uninstalled and updated my sound card drivers, which also did not change anything.

I've exhausted my sysinternals-fu and cannot figure out how to determine which of my hardware devices is the problem child. Where should I go next?

Answer 1

As suggested by @Shinrai, I worked down the list of devices and drivers including rolling back such things as chipset drivers. Unfortunately these attempts did not change anything. A cursory look through device manager revealed nothing as well.

However, when I took a look at Event Viewer it became obvious who the culprit was!

Almost every second there was a failure from \Device\cdrom0:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Cdrom
Event Category: None
Event ID: 15
Description:
The device, \Device\CdRom0, is not ready for access yet.

At this point I opened up the properties for the device, but everything seemed in order. However, the rhythmic high pitched hum I was hearing through my speakers prompted me to disable the Digital Audio input.

Viola, no more stuttering or digital humming! Now just to figure out why the CDROM fails coming out of standby...

Answer 2

Even just reading the title I suspected a bad hardware driver, before I got to reading about your checks. :) It's entirely possible that an unrelated update is interfering with a previously installed driver, or even that you have a device that's actually got something wrong with it.

The tedious, but probably foolproof thing to do is to manually uninstall each and every device in the machine one at a time until the behavior stops, and there's (at least a big hint towards) your culprit.