Does having the Bitcoin Client running always use up a lot of the CPU? I have the Bitcoin Client running on my laptop, it is up to date and now fully synchronised, but it is running the CPU at almost 100% and so makes doing anything else extremely slow. Is this normal?

Whilst it was 'synchronising with the network' it was doing the same but I assumed it was because synchronising with the network used up a lot of processing power, but it does the same now - is this likely to always be same or have I done something wrong in the set up?  (my laptop has 2GB memory, has 2.20GHz processor and running on windows vista)

Many thanks in advance
The normal bitcoin client should not use more than a few percentages, if not even zero, from your CPU.

What client are you running? The Bitcoin-Qt client? Did you ever enabled the "generate bitcoins" option? I'm not sure if it's in the Bitcoin-Qt client's settings, but you could've enabled it in your bitcoin.conf file.

Maybe you should post your bitcoin.conf file. Or just make sure it doesn't have generate=true in it.