SharePoint service uses all available CPU (owstimer.exe)

I noticed my test web server was running slowly, and when I ran perfmon, I found that CPU utilization was pegged at 100%. I ran taskmgr and looked for processes using a lot of CPU. At first I didn’t see any, but after selecting the Show processes from all users checkbox, I discovered that owstimer.exe was using 95 to 99% of CPU time. I learned that this process is used to perform scheduled tasks in SharePoint – interesting since this server doesn't host anything that uses SharePoint. I confirmed that SharePoint is installed on the test web server

To eliminate the CPU utilization problem, in services.msc, I stopped and disabled the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service.

To determine when SharePoint was installed, I launched SQL Server Management Studio on the test server and connected to the SQL Server instance on the local machine. There I found some SharePoint databases -- WSS_AdminContent, WSS_AdminConfig and WSS_Content. By right-clicking each of these and viewing the properties, I was able to see that they were created on Dec 30 2009, almost a year ago. SharePoint has apparently been present all along, and was likely installed as part of Team Foundation Services.

This doesn’t explain why a SharePoint service suddenly started performing some action that consumed all available CPU time. That remains a mystery. According to several other online posts, other people have experienced the same thing.