Cobalt Flux pads cpu usage increase

Hi all,
Ages ago I purchased 2 Cobalt Flux pads - been a long time before I had anywhere to have them set up and organise a laptop and screen just for them so I can play in my garage whenever I like.
I decided to update stepmania to 5 and also set up some other games on the laptop and I noticed that the game performance seemed poorer than what I was used to.

Checked the cpu usage in Taskmanager and it was sitting on 50% at idle! No software processes were causing it, so I trialled various hardware / software removals and lo! When I unplugged the Cobalt pads the cpu load disappeared! One pad ~ 15-20% load, Two pads 30-50% load. Woah.

I was using a USB hub and tried plugging them into the USB ports directly on the laptop and the issue reduced, but still a cpu load from just having the pads plugged in.
This doesn't seem to happen with any of my other many USB devices and controllers.

Does anyone else see a similar behaviour or have a suggestion on what might be happening here?

I'm using Windows XP.
Here's a pic of my setup from a while back - pads weren't plugged in yet and no dedicated tv - not fancy.

What CPU is it? :P

It sounds like there's something else running on the machine that is attempting to read the pads all the time when they're plugged in, but if it's not showing up as a process in task manager then I don't know what to say. Maybe the drivers are screwed up.

Maybe try updating that laptop to a newer version of Windows or something, XP isn't even supported by Microsoft anymore.

Stepmania idles at 40-50% cpu usage for me too, on Linux, so I doubt it has anything to do with windows xp. Unplugging my CF pair made no difference.

StepMania is supposed to use most of one core at idle. I read it as the system was just running at that without SM running if the pads were plugged in, if SM is running then this is not really something to worry about.

This is with nothing running - not StepMania or any other input related software (that I'm aware of).
But I like the possibility something is polling the pads and going a bit haywire as suggested by shakesoda.

I'll do a fresh install of windows on the laptop at some stage to see if the problem goes away.

I was fishing to see if it's something other cobalt owners had noticed and was actually a hardware or driver issue that could be confirmed.

In the meantime, I'll just leave them unplugged until I want to play.

Thanks for the responses.