Unable to find REALPLAY.EXE file in my c drive

My PC became suddenly very slow, and then I thought of checking Task Manager. Sure enough, I found REALPLAY.EXE using lots of CPU power and yet no real player app. open. I then searched for that .EXE file on my drive C and Windows could not find it. Is this a hoax? It always scares me when I see a background program taking a third of my CPU for no apparent reason. According to me, if it were a legitimate background program looking to see if there is an upgrade; it would take 2% of the CPU, not 35%.

The "real" Real Player is not an essential part of Windows. Recommend that you check your list of installed programs and uninstall Real Player if it is listed. So far as XP is concerned the legitimate RealPlayer.exe file would most likely be found in the C:\Program Files\Real folder or Real Player sub-folder. If there is no such folder on your computer, then you are probably dealing with a malware item pretending to be the legitimate Real Player.

Microsoft seems determined to make what once was the relatively simple task of searching for a file a great deal more complicated. To get a good search that does that does the whole drive requires careful analysis of search options and settings. Certainly if RealPlayer.exe is listed as a process in TaskManager, then it must exist somewhere on your computer. If it is not found by a search, then you are not searching "correctly".

Installing MalwareBytes and running a scan through it would be a good start. If MalwareBytes will not download or does not install correctly or will not run to completion, after that you definitely have a malware difficulty and possibly will need some heavy duty help in getting rid of it. There is a file available from "BleepingComputer.com" known as rkill.exe I find that running that file previous to attempting to install/run MalwareBytes is often helpful to enable MalwareBytes to run successfully.

A hoax is a message with false information you see on a webpage on in a mail message - not in Task Manager. The easiest way to locate both the MalwareBytes and the rkill program download sites is to Google them. Be aware that some antivirus programs object (wrongly) to rkill.exe in any event I normally turn off the active scanning part of any installed antivirus before attempting to run either rkill.exe or MalwareBytes.

There is also a portable version of SuperAntiSpyware obtainable that is able to download to a USB stick and after that run from that stick on top of an infected computer. The download includes a fairly recent set of definitions so it does not need to be updated, just run from the stick. For that reason you need to download the latest portable version each time you want to use it as the definitions that come with it will become outdated as time passes.