dvanaman,
Thank you for getting an answer for me. I ended up going through several cycles of installing/uninstalling v5 and v6 alternately, while trying to monitor what processes were running and the event logs. Though I am no closer to knowing why I was having some of my troubles, I was able to solve a couple. I cannot help but think that removing the folder from AppData did provide some benefit beyond simply removing the SQL errors.
The issue with ZoneAlarm displaying on startup and not being able to stop it from running at startup turned out to be a registry hive issue between the current user and local machine hives for the startup entry of ZoneAlarm's client software. I was able to resolve that myself and will be sending a report to CheckPoint. It is my belief that this was not caused by LTT and was simply a coincidence.
I still do not know why there was resource (CPU) contention earlier, but I will continue to monitor for it and see if I can diagnose the cause. It is possible, now that I've had a chance to really look at things, that the more advanced real time scanning modes of the new AV/AS engine in ZoneAlarm 9.1 may actually be more the cause than LTT. I have decided that, at least for now, to keep the new version installed and see what happens.
For those wishing to keep LTT 6 installed but to minimize (if not totally eliminate) any running processes, the following seems to be have worked for me. Since I am not familiar with what all LTT 6 attempts to provide, anyone who tries these steps does so at their own risk:
1. Run LTT, go to Settings (upper right corner) and uncheck everything.
2. Uncheck the icon in the taskbar using the steps listed in the FAQ.
3. Go to (at least for XP) Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scheduled Tasks and disable the SystemToolsDailyTest task. The PCDoctorBackgroundMonitor task could also be disabled if #1 did not do so already.
I have left these scheduled tasks enabled on for now, in the event that one or both of them is/are the cause of my high resource contention issue.
I have confirmed that LTT6 did not install any new services nor new startup items. It is possible that an existing service's files could have been updated, but I did not spend the time to do file comparisons between LTT5 and LTT6, so I don't really know one way or the other. Since the only automated execution that I can find appears to be covered by the steps above, I doubt that any services were updated. But that is just an educated guess.
Although it's a small thing, I would like to see more intelligence in the System Health->Windows Update check. Apparently, if WIndows Auto update is turned off, LTT always thinks an OS update has never been done. Surely there is a timestamp somewhere in one of the registry hives to indicate when the last OS update was performed. If so, that would be a better variable to control LTT's message. Then again, autoupdate may be the only thing that populates such a timestamp. If that's true, it will never have a value on my machines as I prefer to do updates on my timeframe. I have LTT set to ignore Windows Updates, but it would be nice to have it enabled and only report a problem when I haven't manually done an OS update in a while (say 1-2 weeks).
Better documentation on this new version prior to its push may have helped to eliminate or reduce some of the troubles we've seen.
Good luck to those with more serious issues than mine. As someone who's written software for nearly 30 years, I find it very encouraging that we have active participation from both Lenovo and PCDoctor. More often than not, this is not the case with a lot of commerical software.
