Win 2k having problem recognise new H/W

I have a PC with windows 2000 and SP2. For some reason since late march my win2k will take forever to recognise a new modem or any hardware. It seems like the OS is having problem with pnp part of it. It will boot and I can login ok but when it try to install the new driver it will take forever I once left it for 4 hours and it still didn’t finish. I have re-installed using the ERD. Also notice the service.exe is runing at close to 100% CPU usage. Normally this file does not run at all.