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
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)
