 | By Susan Bradley Patching should protect our systems first and foremost, but lately I’ve been tracking issues that affect the patching process. First, some folks were turning off auto-update to ensure they wouldn’t get Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) or Internet Explorer 7. Now, Microsoft’s very patch mechanism itself needs some help. |
When svchost.exe consumes all CPU time
I started tracking the first patch for this issue back in July. Users were reporting that the svchost.exe process was taking 100% of the CPU resources.
The more tech-savvy among us used Sysinternal’s ProcessExplorer tool and discovered that the culprit was WUAUCLNT, the service that provides automatic updates.
KB 914810 was the first patch offered up to fix this issue. Then, a few months later, came KB 916089. This announced itself as a “fix” for the issue. Even then, the patch wasn’t publically released and could only be obtained by calling Microsoft Product Support.
Now, there’s yet another patch for this same issue, which is discussed on Nick Whittome’s blog. When a Knowledge Base article about this fix is released, the number will be 927891. (An article with that number was not yet live while I was writing this column).
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