>
> This is getting very urgent does anyone have any ideas?
>
>

It certainly sounds like a sweep.
Crack open task manager, find the process that's doing the sweep, and lock
it to one CPU(affinity), so that one busy process isn't swapping around
between CPU's
That should get it done quicker.

Why it's happening, I don't know, but I'm no expert.
You might just need to give it time to process...
Is your last backup ok? Can you restore to another machine just to test it?

N.