Random 100% GPU usage in MSI Afterburner

I seem to have a strange issue with my GPU usage randomly jumping to 100% in MSI Afterburner for anything from 5 to 60 seconds.

While it's at 100% my desktop switches from Aero to basic (Windows 7 Pro 64-bit).

This is with an AMD 7950 on Catalyst 12.8 but I've had the same problem before with an Nvidia GTX 560 Ti.

MSI Afterburner is 2.2.3.

I was just browsing the web I thought it might be something to do with Flash Player as I was on YouTube at the time but Flash Player isn't running, the YT vid was WebM. I can't seem to replicate this either.

Two different cards, same Windows install, both using MSI Afterburner (although the 560 Ti was using an older version).

Any ideas?

Cheers.

It sometimes happens to me, usually on GPU 2. I found starting something that uses both GPUs will normally return GPU 2 to 0% afterwards, but till then I can see the graph plotting at 100% for no apparent reason.

How often does this happen? Could be the stupid WinSAT trying to update your WEI. Just disable it.

You use firefox? Found that if I had hardware acceleration on it used to blitz my gpu to 100% for some reason every time it did something, and it would sometimes cause the drivers to crash out too...guess being told to use 100% it didn't like.

Turned it off and been fine ever since with no crashing.

I have a AMD GPU btw.