Ok, so here is my good deed for the day. In case this helps anyone since at least I've been somewhat baffled.
Some time ago I noticed that the "System interrupts" task/process is always taking 5-7% from one of my cores. After looking for it on google and trying some solutions, nothing helped. When I checked the interrupts in the performance monitor, they were like 200k - 300k/s! (Yes, that is 200 thousand interrupts per second!) After monitoring the interrupts themselves, the culprit was supposedly usbport.sys (the driver for the usb2 ports). Of course I thought that it should be something related to the usb ports, so I've disabled and disconnected everything, connected to a usb port one by one. I even unistalled the drivers for the usb wireless adapter I am using and also all the drivers for any currently not connected devices (like usb sticks, external hdds, etc.). After that I started disabling the usb hosts in device manager one by one. Finally thinking that it might be related to some of the storage drivers from Intel, I also unistalled them all. Still no dice!
Finally I just thought "What the hell - just remove all drivers and install them anew"(since there was certainly no such issues in the beginning). After removing the Intel video drivers the interrupts stopped! What a shock was it! Of course I had to be sure, so I installed them again (from the gui installer) and the interrupts jumped from around 10k to 200k. I removed them and then tried to install them not by the gui installer, but with manual installation and surprise, surprise - it worked! In the gui installer however, there is also a driver for monitor audio or some such and I suspect that it might actually be the culprit (since with just the vc drivers, everything is normal). This is on an i7 4770 (HD4600) with the 10.18.10.3345 driver and Windows 8.1.
The thing is that I might not even have noticed, since on 4770 it was literally a few percent hit on a single core, but since it was consistently there (and it was the system interrupts task, no less!), I got spooked that it might be a keylogger
Hopefully this will be useful for someone (especially if looking on google).
Some time ago I noticed that the "System interrupts" task/process is always taking 5-7% from one of my cores. After looking for it on google and trying some solutions, nothing helped. When I checked the interrupts in the performance monitor, they were like 200k - 300k/s! (Yes, that is 200 thousand interrupts per second!) After monitoring the interrupts themselves, the culprit was supposedly usbport.sys (the driver for the usb2 ports). Of course I thought that it should be something related to the usb ports, so I've disabled and disconnected everything, connected to a usb port one by one. I even unistalled the drivers for the usb wireless adapter I am using and also all the drivers for any currently not connected devices (like usb sticks, external hdds, etc.). After that I started disabling the usb hosts in device manager one by one. Finally thinking that it might be related to some of the storage drivers from Intel, I also unistalled them all. Still no dice!
Finally I just thought "What the hell - just remove all drivers and install them anew"(since there was certainly no such issues in the beginning). After removing the Intel video drivers the interrupts stopped! What a shock was it! Of course I had to be sure, so I installed them again (from the gui installer) and the interrupts jumped from around 10k to 200k. I removed them and then tried to install them not by the gui installer, but with manual installation and surprise, surprise - it worked! In the gui installer however, there is also a driver for monitor audio or some such and I suspect that it might actually be the culprit (since with just the vc drivers, everything is normal). This is on an i7 4770 (HD4600) with the 10.18.10.3345 driver and Windows 8.1.
The thing is that I might not even have noticed, since on 4770 it was literally a few percent hit on a single core, but since it was consistently there (and it was the system interrupts task, no less!), I got spooked that it might be a keylogger
Hopefully this will be useful for someone (especially if looking on google).
