High Cpu Usage, Extremely Choppy Sound And Video

I have been having this problem for a couple of days now. I was listening to music which had been skipping for a while but not to bad and suddenly everything froze. i killed winamp and hit pulled up the task mgr. cpu usage was staying around 100% different processes popping up to the top. i downloaded process explorer and it has a file highlighted in dark red wmiprvse.exe i read this could be a virus but i verifed it was in the correct folder. im running win xp media center edition with sp3. while looking at processes in the task mgr the system idle process is usually at the top of the list. my computer pretty much freezes up every few seconds now for a second or 2 and whenever i open any program it freezes up for a good minute or 2. Anything else ya'll might need to know feel free to ask. is there a way i could check if it is a hardware problem? this is a Hp pavillion laptop amd turion 1.99ghz 2gb ram. i have also tweaked xp to run faster by removing the themes among other things. I think thats the only thing saving me right now.