Starting this week my computer has suddenly slowed down substantially, particularly when opening programs. I'm running Windows Vista.

I looked into Task Manager and sorted the processes by % of usage and found that the Pure Network service is almost alwasy using nearly 50% of my resources.

I googled it and the information I found said it is used by my network.

Can anyone tell me what the heck it's really doing and if I need for it to run all the time?

FWIW - I don't have anything special on the network. 2 Tivo's, a few computers and ipod/ipads. Not all of them are concurrent. We're both wired and wireless.