Hello,
I recently installed SP3 on my laptop and desktop PC's running Windows XP
Home SP2. Everything was fine for about a week, but last night, both PC's
slowed till a standstill and became unusable.
The show an instance of SVCHost.exe using 99% of the CPU. I used Process
Explorer to narrow the problem down to the Automatic Update service. Stop it
and SVCHost.exe goes to 0% usage and System Idle jumps back to 99%.
I left the PC on today for 12 hours to see if it was actually downloading
something and might "fix" itself. After 12 hours, it was still using 99% for
svchost. No network activity light and no hard drive usage; just running the
PC full bore.
I knew this was a problem that happened to some people a year ago, and there
was a fix. However, wasn't SP3 supposed to have all those fixes. Why did
this start happenening on two different PC's at exactly the same time,, with
both having SP3 installed.
Also SP3 was installed from disc, not download and installed with no errors
on either machine.
Can anyone help me with a solution that will allow me to use automatic
updates, and not have svchost.exe use 99% of my CPU. With the problem, it
takes 10 minutes to open Explorer, or even 5 minutes just to get a command
prompt to come up.