[AIDA consumes CPU time and HDD when idle]

Now AIDA64 might be using that but I can tell you on my system that AIDA64 is monitoring everything it can Resource Monitor shows AIDA64 averaging 0.64% use! so at 10% I think something else might be going on in your system.

No, these 10% are definitely from AIDA. I can see it with procexp and procmon. It maybe 0.64% on your system with I7, but I have just Core 2 Duo on my laptop.

What frequency of system polling have you set?

I didn't set anything. It is default to 5 sec for the system tray icons.

[AIDA consumes CPU time and HDD when idle]

Most of the time I have AIDA running for a single purpose: show HDD temperature in the system tray. So AIDA stays minimized to the system tray with only one sensor visible in the tray as well. For this single task AIDA constantly consumes 10% of my CPU power and constantly searches something on disk. It is a laptop and I want my CPU and HDD stay idle as long as possible. Procmon shows that AIDA constantly searches for a file sqlctr90.dll in all paths listed in the PATH environment variable and also constantly goes over about one and half thousand registry paths. I understand that this is maybe a very important file. But why to search it over and over again and so frequently? One time is not enough? Why read so much registry information so frequently when all it shows is a single sensor value in the tray?