I think I mentioned this in another post recently, but it's a great utility so I don't feel bad repeating myself.

Check out Whatsrunning. It will show you all processes, services, modules, drivers, ip connections, startup apps and system information. It will also catch processes that task manager won't.

For startup apps, it doesn't delete them if you disable one. It will keep it in the list in case you change you mind. It just won't be executed at startup.

The ip connections tab is very helpful since if it shows you with a few hundred connections active, you know something is wrong.

You can also trace backwards and forwards from different screens by using process id, parent process id, etc. And you can see how many page faults there have been, page file usage, etc, etc.

It's a great utility and it's free.

BTW, don't be intimidated if you don't understand all of the parameters it can show you - I don't think there are many people who aren't windows programmers who would.

Update.
BOINC kicked in, the computer reverted to normal when I keystroked but it's slow. Even when I shut down BOINC! No great increase in ip activity.
What should I be looking for on What's running?

It's hard to diagnose these things long distance so really i'm just guessing.

According to WR, firefox is using from 110-190% of the cpu (4 cores) - and that is just sitting in the background. so my guess is that with boinc loaded, you are hitting your page file more than you would otherwise.

in WR, go to the first tab - processes. right click and click 'select process columns'. check off 'page file usage'. While you're here, you can also select 'page fault count' and 'peak page file usage'. One or more might already be checked. The checked items bubble to the top of the listing. Save your selections. Now click on the column heading for page file usage.

for me, ff is using about 800MB of the page file - and I have 8gig of memory. Each wcg app (3 hfcc and one flu) is using about 225MB.

If you don't know what that means, don't worry. The page file is where windows swaps stuff to when it doesn't have enough physical RAM. It copies the data from applications that aren't currently running out to a file on the hard disk. When the application is restarted, it copies that data back to RAM so it can be accessed.

The point is that as page file usage goes up, performance goes down - sometimes dramatically.

However once you kill boinc, it should return the memory to the system and everything should work the way it used to. However in your case apparently this is not happening. Double check in WR that both boinc progams (3 if you include boinctray) and all science apps have been terminated. The science apps always (i think) start with wcg. Terminating boinc manager does not kill the science app IIRC.

To have boinc ALWAYS free up memory - even if just suspended - go into the advanced boinc view and click the 'advanced' menu option and then 'preferences'. Click the last tab - disk and memory usage. At the bottom, there is a box labeled 'leave applications in memory while suspended.' I think the default is to have this checked. If it is checked, uncheck it. Restart boinc. Actually, doing a full reboot might be better.

Note: doing this may cause additional delay when coming back to the computer after it has been idle since boinc has to write everything out to disk. On an old AMD machine i had, this could take up to 30 seconds or more. It shouldn't be anything close to that for you though.

Good luck. If i'm not around later, i look for this thread tomorrow.

You'll have to wait until one of the CA's chime in. Don't know much about BOINC installation except for a few quirks I've run into.

If all the science apps and all the boinc processes have been killed and no longer show in WR, then something else is wrong.

You could try going into the Startup tab in WR and unchecking the 2 boinc apps and rebooting. If they don't start then neither will the science apps.

If you still have the problem after that, then it's not boinc and it's time to do a malware scan.

Also, you probably have an HDD activity light on the laptop. Is that blinking excessively when you know there shouldn't be any disk activity? A badly fragmented disk will slow you down too - especially if you are near capacity.

But like I said, I'm just guessing here. There are an indefinite number of things that can slow you down. You have to do what you can to narrow the problem down to something manageable that you can then start researching.

I know this is frustrating, but I'm not sure what else to say. If I think of anything else I'll post it.