Thanks to those who have replied.  By continuing to bumble along, I've
managed to stop this pattern of my CPU usage going up after I close Internet
Explorer, though I'm not sure it necessarily clarifies what was going on.

I investigated whether I saw this same pattern on a back up computer, also
running Win98SE and IE 6.  I did not see this CPU spike upon closing
Internet Explorer after visiting a site with scripts running, so I tried to
see what was different between the two set ups.  At first, I thought it
might be the security or advanced settings, but going with default set ups
on both machines didn't make any difference (ie, one computer still showed
the CPU spike after closing IE while the other didn't).  I cleared out the
temp files and cookies in both, but this didn't make any difference either.
I used Ad-aware to make sure there wasn't any known spy ware running, but
this didn't affect things either.

Finally, I looked under Internet Options > General Tab > Temporary Internet
Files, Settings Button > View Objects Button.  The system that wasn't
showing the CPU spike only had one downloaded program file listed, something
called "CV3 class", while the computer that was showing the CPU spike had
about 8 listings.  I went through removing these files to see if one of them
was the culprit.  The last one I removed, which was listed as some sort of
shockwave flash object (I think), seemed to solve the problem.  Both
computers only have the "CV3 class" object listed, now, and neither shows a
CPU usage spike after closing IE.

I'm not sure why having that shockwave object downloaded was causing me to
see the extra CPU usage afer IE was closed (let alone why this only happened
after I visited a page with scripts running on it), but there you have it.
I'm still a bit mystified and open to enlightenment.  :-)

By the way, Mike, no there was no disk activity associated with the CPU
spike upon closing IE.  I could also see, using system monitor, that the the
amount of memory being used decreased and the number of kernel threads
decreased back to base line, too.  Just the CPU usage seemed to go up,
instead of down, after IE was closed.  Very weird.

John

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