Ive tried removing everything from this circuit. At the moment the 555 is running from a breadboard through a seperate regulator and pin 3 feeds back into the circuit to the transistor. This seperate regulator is cold. The main regulator stays cold until i connect the IR emitters then it gets really hot. Ive checked the current with a multimeter. With both regulators and the 555 it uses 16.5 (milliamps i assume). When i connect the IR emitters it jumps to 101.2 and keeps increasing to about 102. The regulator gets hot quite quick.

Im a little worried about this heat because i need to connect the PIC chip, an RS485 chip and the audio amp circuit and they all use the same regulator.

It looks like using 2 or maybe 3 regulators for the different parts of the circuit should solve everything. Ive got some heatsinks i can put on too.

I still cant figure out why the 555 causes such problems. At the moment the emitters are running from the same board as the PIC. The 555 and its resistors/capacitors etc are running from a seperate regulator and it all works fine. The emitters are drawing way more current than anything else yet its not those causing it. It doesnt appear to be a short and my picoscope shows a fairly stable voltage. I also checked the picoscope when it wasnt connected to anything and the line looked pretty much identical but at 0V so most of it is just noise that the scope picks up.