Freezup caused by CPU hog "svchost.exe"

[Rich Pasco]

Every so often, my Windows 2000 computer seems to freeze up, without
warning, for up to ten minutes at a time. During this time, it is
so slow as to be useless, and task Manager shows 99% CPU going to
svchost.exe.

Tuesday I looked at it with Process Explorer and found that its
parent process was services.exe and its child process was wuaclt.exe
(apparently, the Windows Update client). This usually happens on
Tuesday afternoons when I am the busiest, and it is very exasperating.
I have Microsoft Update configured to download and install updates
3:00 a.m. so this is not the issue.

Can anyone suggest what might be going on?

- Rich

 

[Ottmar Freudenberger]

Every so often, my Windows 2000 computer seems to freeze up, without
warning, for up to ten minutes at a time. During this time, it is
so slow as to be useless, and task Manager shows 99% CPU going to
svchost.exe.

You may wanna give the installation of Windows Update Agent 3.0 a chance:
http://download.windowsupdate.com/v7/windowsupdate/redist/standalone/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe

Bye,
Freudi

 

[Daniel Chow [MSFT]]

Rich, please take a look at http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/ for the solution.
Like Ottmar said, give Windows Update Agent 3.0 a try and make sure you have
the latest MSI fix installed as well (info on
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927891). You may still see 100% CPU usage
from svchost.exe after installing these fixes but that's just normal. You
shall see no more lock-up while Windows Update Agent is scanning for
updates.

Thanks,

--
Daniel Chow
Microsoft Corporation
Windows Server Update Services
(I prefer to communicate through the newsgroup, so please do not email me
unless necessary. Thx!)

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