Thanks, I've got it figured out. @Flavius, it wasn't shortcut overlays..I've had vista shortcut manager installed for some time.
It was definitely Norton. I had tried to set up the backup options in Norton 360, but every time I so much as opened the window to adjust the settings, cpu would spike and stay spiked...couldn't do anything at all except wonder when my tower was going to take flight. Then Norton would stop responding, and I would end up having to reboot. I finally got sick of dealing with it and just decided not to use backup, but somewhere along the line I must have enabled those icon overlays.
@Frostmourne, if you know anything about Norton, I sure would like to know how to get control of that ccsvchst process. It just goes crazy sometimes!