A funny thing happened to me. About a month ago I upgraded my CPU on a vista laptop. System found and installed drivers just fine. I just noticed today in task manager:

Think I should just uninstall my ghost cely?

I doubt it'd do anything, but sure, go ahead; as the device isn't there it isn't doing anything, but you could run into a rare area where something may identify you as having dual processors which could lead to trouble with the device "missing".

How difficult was it to upgrade your processor?

Well after uninstalling it I got this:
It kind of looks like one of the cores had kept the old driver and one went with the new. I have been disappointed with the battery life. Maybe now It will properly speadstep on both cores.
This laptop was an acer 3680 series. It actually has been the second hardest laptop I have disassembled(fist being a g4 ibook). This model needs to be completely disassembled to get to the cpu. It probably took me about an hour and a half to disassemble and half an hour to reassemble.
I'm kind of kicking myself right now. I could have gotten the gateway laptop from Best Buy this week for the same price, $350. I personally like the aesthetics of the gateways right now. More importantly the cpu (with heatsink) can be accessed by a hatch, similar to the ram slots on most.

Lol yeh, i'd say it could likely have been the old processors lingering driver that could have been affecting things.

I need to replace my laptop sooner or later, I'm on a dell inspiron 4150 that i've had for years (5); it's falling apart (literally, the monitor hinge snapped, so it rarely stays open without an acrobatic act to get it to stay this way) but funding just doesn't permit

I say chuck the older driver. I don't consider myself a newb when it comes to hardware... but 100Mhz makes that much a difference? I hope u got that CPu for free. As far as that 4100 series laptop u have to tighten the screws regularly by removing the hinge covers. That is one of the oldest flaws of the earlier Dell laptops.

Tighten the screws? that has nothing to do with the hinge snapping in two...