suddenly Win2K slows down

[horst]

My system works just fine, except suddenly it slows down for about 20
seconds. Even the mouse moves jerkily. Then it runs well for exactly 60
minutes and it slows down for 20 seconds again.
I checked my system with File Monitor (www.sysinternals.com) and I found
it: services.exe reads the hosts file for 20 seconds!
The hosts file is rather large (over 4000 lines), but I really cannot
understand why Win2K needs so much time to read it claiming over 90% of
all CPU resources.
Any suggestion?
Horst

 

[Dan Seur]

Perhaps you have an antivirus or similar process that is scanning the
hosts file as it is accessed by services.exe? Or some other check is
being performed...

 

[horst]

Perhaps you have an antivirus or similar process that is scanning the
hosts file as it is accessed by services.exe? Or some other check is
being performed...

I deactivated antivirus prog, but nothing changed.
According to File Monitor there are always different progs running
before service.exe, so it seems that it is activated by the system
directly exactly once every 60 minutes.
But I cannot understand why it needs so much time to read this file.
Why does the system read this file even if there is no internet activity?
I reduced hosts to 10 lines and now it needs "only" 4 seconds to read it!
Any further suggestion?
Horst