Windos XP updates, svchost and IE8

There's something really weird in WinXP updates world.
Here is my story.

I manage nearly 25 clients, more than half based on WinXP Pro and the other with Win7 Pro (mixed 32 and 64 bit environment).

One week ago, one XP user calls me saying that her PC was too slow to let her work. I go there to take a look and I found that there was a svchost.exe eating 100% CPU. Killing that process frees all the resources and the PC was usable again.
The day after, so on next reboot, the same happes: 100% CPU by svchost.exe and PC unusable. Killing that process solve the issue for the whole working day.
"Unfortunately" the user was smart enough to kill that process on her own every day.
The even "worst" thing comes from the fact that I had to travel for a few days and, at the same time, the "trouble" spread around: 2-3 other clients (physically close to the first) experience the same problem, with the "same" solution working.

After coming back home I decide to take a look closely to the problem.
I was a bit worried by some virus spreading around, but I was also thinking about the fact that I have a good antivirus on all client and my users can be trusted.

I had no idea in how to solve this issue: looking around by googling for "svchost.exe 100% CPU" is like googling for "news" and try to find the exactly news you're looking out for.

Fortunately the same problem happens to another user, well a skilled developer in R&D department. He find the same issue on its XPMode VM inside Win7Pro, and it solve it! How? "By installing windows updates.."

Mmmmhhhh...

Windows updates are automatically installed on all clients (apart on XPmode VM, which are managed directly by the developers) so this give me no so much hints.. but was enough for Google!
Adding  "windows update" to the other keyword give me this as first result:





http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-windows_update/latest-windows-xp-update-and-svchostexe-problems/57ff2a95-3a9c-4e85-a879-b340c65acfa5

It takes only a couple of minutes to do some statistics about my WinXP client world:

• all the PC affected by svchost.exe problem has IE6 installed
• all the PC unaffected by svchost.exe problem has IE8 installed

Installing IE8 as described in MS answer above (or by downloading it from this direct link) solved the issue!


IE8 updates was one of the "optional" updates of WinXP: IOW user can say "no" to it and continue live happily with IE6 (we all use firefox a default browser)

Ubuntu 12.04, USB3 and Suspend

The only BIG problem I have on my Dell Vostro 3550 laptop with Ubuntu (I use only LTS version, so I'm still stuck with 12.04) is with USB3 ports.

By looking deeper to some details of the problem I've found that USB devices connected on USB3 does not work (they are not even detected) only after resuming from suspend.. and my laptop is always suspend and never shutdown!

I've googled around and found this interesting topic in askubuntu.com which, itself, links to this solution, regarding Asus K52 / Asus A52.

I adapt the suspend/resume script to my laptop as follows:

root@kimbamon:~# cat /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_dell_vostro_usb3_suspend
case "${1}" in
        hibernate|suspend)
              # Switch USB3 bus off
              echo -n "0000:0b:00.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd/unbind
        ;;
        resume|thaw)
              # Switch USB3 buses on
              echo -n "0000:0b:00.0" > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/xhci_hcd/bind
        ;;
esac

After editing the file with your favorite editor, don't forget  to make it executable

chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/dell_vostro_usb3_suspend

As far as I test it, this solve my USB3 issue and now USB3 peripheral works even after resuming from suspend

Please note that, in case you need it, you can also run the script manually (as root, of course) to simulate a suspend/resume sequence and, thus, reset the USB3 bus