Debugging explorer.exe Activity

[Jason Williams]

I have a very strange problem with my laptop. I have an IBM Thinkpad T30
running XP Professional. Whenever I am connected to my wireless router at
home (Linksys), every so often explorer.exe starts taking about 50% CPU and
the computer gets real sluggish. I do not have this same problem when I am
connected to the wireless network and work or when I am hard wired into my
router at home. I have WEP enabled on my home router and I filter on MAC
addresses so I don't believe that anyone external is connected to my
network. I have also scanned my home computers for viruses and they came up
clean. Is there any way at all to debug explorer.exe to see what exactly is
is trying to do? I have looked at Perfmon logs of %CPU for all processes
and there doesn't seem to be any other process that goes crazy right before
or during the time that explorer.exe does. If any one has any ideas, I'd
love to hear them.

Jason

 

[Dwight_s]

Jason, I won't be much help but wanted to acknowledge that I am
experiencing the same type of problem. I have a Cisco 350 wireless
PCMCIA card in a Dell Latitude C610 running Windows XP professional
and am using it with a Linksys Wireless Router. I am OK running it at
work. I'm not sure what kind of hardware we are using for our access
points. When running at home, I run for a few minutes and then
explorer.exe goes to 50-100 percent until I turn the wireless card
off.

If I don't let XP configure my wirless network card and use the
Aironet client utility to configure the card, it works both at work
and at home. No big deal, but I would have liked to have been able to
use the wireless configuration tools built into XP.

Dwight

 

[John Jackson]

I just wanted to add I'm having the same XP / cisco 350 / linksys
router problem. 350 works fine at work with cisco ap's, at home with
my linksys my explorer.exe jumps to 50% of the cpu. I've tried with
and without WEP, channels 1,6 and 11. Long and short premables. This
process would be a whole lot easier to troubleshoot if it were any
other process other then explorer. I'll continue the try different
things, and watch this thread.

 

[John Jackson]

I have found the answer. The problem seems to be the "Wireless Zero
Configuration" services. If you go Control Pannel, Admin Tools,
Services. You can stop this service there. WARNING This will remove
the "Wireless Network" tab from you network properties. You will have
to use Cisco's ACU app. IF you have another wireless card on you
computer, you will NOT be able configure it's wireless settings
through windows. You will need another app to do this. Most newer
cards/drivers (Intel Centreno for example) have this.

I have a TAC case open with Cisco on this. I will post what they come
back with.

HTH,
John