Pointer Flashing?

my pointer and the little glass with randomly start to look like something is loading but nothing is loading. It does it like every 5 secs. What could be the problem?

 

Hi XMan9000,
Icon turns to hour glass when your system is busy. Something is being done in the background. May be a virus scan or, heaven forbid, a virus, may be mail retrieval, could be almost anything.... Do a keyboard combo of ctrl/alt/del to bring up taskman. Click on the "Processes" tab and see what is using or hogging up the "CPU" processor as indicated by the numbers under the heading "CPU ".