24hr crash in help and support service?

[Guest]

XP SP2 on big domain with lots of remote control, scanning, auditing, and
update stuff running. i was having periodic crashes, 0x8e, unknown driver,
etc.. once per night at the same time plus or minus a few minutes. IT did a
bit of troubleshooting and ended up replacing mother board and memory.
Didn't fix it. i turned on all auditing (i do have local admin because of
needs of my job) one night and caught the help and support service starting
up to do something just before the crash. first, what would help and support
service be doing every 24 hours that required a network services login?? and
then when i stop and disable the help and support service the crashes
stopped... turn it back on and they start again, at a different time, so it
seems to be related to how long that service has been running. any ideas??
i can live without that service most of the time and just manually start it
if needed, but is there a lower level problem maybe??

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Are you referring to Help and Support service -- helpsvc.exe?

If so, you should know that for some users, including yours truly,
helpsvc.exe will occasionally start and consume huge amounts of CPU
processing, which causes the hard disk to 'thrash' and noticeably slows the
computer.

This is a known problem that was supposed to be fixed in SP 2. It nontheless
continues to plague some SP 2 installations, including mine. In all the
research I have done I have come across three solutions. First is to
completely uninstall and then reinstall the Help and Support Center. Second
is to edit certain registry keys involving helpsvc.exe. These solutions
apparently work for some, but not for others.

The third solution - and the one guaranteed to work - is to disable the Help
and Support service. This is what I was forced to do. I'm not real crazy
about this, since it means I can no longer use the Help and Support Center
or the System Information utility. Now the internet is my Help and Support
Center and a third party utility has replaced System Information.

 

[Guest]

i'm not sure what the exe does. i see it as a service run from svchost in
the services control panel. i haven't noticed the cpu hog or disk thrashing,
but i never was here when it actually crashed the system so don't know what
it might have done at that time. disabling the help and support service from
the services control panel has stopped the crash anyway.