VERY high CPU usage

[Zigzag]

I recently noticed that my % of CPU usage while idling was incredibly high (48% to 50%), and decided to check it out in the Resource Monitor. Turned out to be a result of Steam.

I did some googling and tried to find answers as to why this was happening and how to fix it, and the only thing that got any results was deleting everything in the Steam folder except the SteamApps folder and Steam.exe and starting from scratch. Steam then went from using 50% to 1%, sometimes 2%. I could actually hear the difference because my computer wasn't running so loud.

Bottom line is that after only a day or two of using Steam again since that "fix", it's back up to 50% and my computer is whirring away like I was having it render a movie. There is absolutely no reason Steam should be using this much of my processor when all I have open is the chat window.

Does anyone know a fix to this besides clearing out the Steam folder every time it starts being a resource hog?

[Zigzag]

I looked through the Steam support page on Steam using up 50% of a dual core processor, and it was of no help whatsoever. I only have one of the programs listed that would have been an issue, and I disabled it- there was no change.

[Meow]

Whats your current CPU?

Steam may just be doing some sort of indexing or optimisation stuff while no other programs are using the CPU.

[Zigzag]

Intel Core 2 Duo (3 GHz).

I shut Steam off completely about 10 minutes ago, and looking at the Resource Monitor, it's still using the entirety of one of my cores. It's not actually doing anything but it somehow using half of my computer's processor.

I have to force the process to end to get rid of it.

[Zigzag]

Update: After completely exiting Steam, ending the process from the Resource Manager, and then starting Steam back up, it doesn't appear to be eating up an entire processor like before.

Not sure what causes it to spiral out of control like that. Don't know when or if it will spike back to 50% again.