How can I see what's causing my CPU to run at a lower C state at idle?

So when I got my m15, I was having really bad battery run times. About a week ago, I did some fiddling in device manager, disabling my 1060 restarting, enabling it, then restarting, and somehow for whatever reason, after the second restart, my idle power draws finally went down to a more reasonable 8-9 watts from 15 previosuly. I didn't do another restart. Yeah, I know, bad practice. Anyways, today I shut it down, and after turning it back on I noticed the battery issues seemed to have come back. Lo and behold, idle power draw is back up. Looking at Throttlestop, apparently my cores are only at C7, essentially the deepest power saving mode it lists around 50 to 60% of the time. I looked in task manager but there didn't appear to be any process that's using my CPU. I'm at a loss as to what to do now, as what I did previously no longer works.

On what might be a related note, is there any way to track down what programs are utilizing my Nvidia GPU? I have the little icon in my taskbar, and I remember when I didn't have battery issues, it would remain grey and unlit for the entire time. Now, it seems to flash with color every so often, even though hovering over it says that no programs are utilizing it. HWInfo shows a brief draw of anywhere between 3 to 7 watts for a few seconds, and I can't narrow down why. I've tried updating drivers, and disabling and reenabling it in device manager to no luck.

 

An idle CPU should have the individual cores spending 99% of their time in the core C7 state.



If this is not happening, open up the Task Manager, go to the Details tab, click on the CPU heading and organize the running tasks by CPU usage from highest to lowest. There must be something or multiple things running on your computer that are preventing your CPU from being idle in C7.

You can also go to the Task Manager Performance tab and open up the Resource Monitor. Once again, organize the running tasks by CPU usage.

Some monitoring programs will keep your Nvidia GPU awake. If HWiNFO is doing this, do not run it. If Nvidia GPU monitoring is selected in ThrottleStop, the button on the main screen should show ---°C which means the GPU is asleep and is not being woken up to be monitored.

Windows 10 by itself is very efficient but you have to watch it like a hawk. Installing one bad program to your system can screw it up. Every time you add something, it is up to you to find out what impact it has on your system.

 

Throttlestop also alternates between displaying GPU as a -- and giving a value, only go to back to --.
I have no idea what's causing this, I'm at 2% idle CPU usage and still something is causing it to run. Literally everything is at 0% utilization besides a few system processes and programs that I can't remove without losing critical functionality.
https://imgur.com/a/Pp8g3Cn
there is all the relevant data.
I'm on the verge of just reinstalling Windows at this point I've been fighting this issue for so long.