MSE Causing Slow Down

[Chuck Tucker]

My wife's computer practically came to a halt and I discovered that two tasks were using nearly 100% of CPU. They were explorer.exe (running about 60+%) and msseces.exe (running aboutt 30+%). The latter is part of the MSE program. I killed it and things wient back to normal. Any ideas why this happens and what do to about it?

[JoeP517]

From What Is Msseces.exe & MsMpEng.exe Process? And Why They Are Running?:

"Msseces.exe is the front-end GUI of MSE(Microsoft Security Essentials). If you have installed the latest antivirus from Microsoft, then this process keeps the program’s graphical interface running."

Did you check to see if MSE was running a scan?

Was explorer being used for copying or moving files during the slowdown?

Joe

[Chuck Tucker]

I don't know if it was running a scan, but after running the initial quick scan I did not turn on any scheduled scans. Perhaps explorer was being used, I have no way of knowing.

[rgrosz]

My wife's computer practically came to a halt and I discovered that two tasks were using nearly 100% of CPU. They were explorer.exe (running about 60+%) and msseces.exe (running aboutt 30+%). The latter is part of the MSE program. I killed it and things wient back to normal. Any ideas why this happens and what do to about it?

I had a similar experience. After Googling on this, I found advice that suggested MSE sometimes gets hung up trying to scan its own EXE file. See this prior post for how to exclude the MSE program folder from the scan process.

[Chuck Tucker]

The funny thing is that I don't have MSE running any scans. At least I didn't have any scheduled. Perhaps it does this on its own.