SVCHOST.EXE

[Carl Gross]

What does it mean when a W2K (SP4) machine keeps giving
a "svchost.exe has generated errors and will be shut down"
error upon startup.

I have a machine that keeps doing that and now has decided
not to retain any of its printers. The machine needs to
be restarted to get them back.

Are they related? What can be done about the svchost
problem?

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

It usually means it's under attack from a virus/trojan. What patch level
is it at, and what AV defs is it running?

 

[Carl Gross]

The workstation is at SP4, and the AV program is Symantec
Corporate Edition 8.1 (The latest). It is updated be an
antivirus server.

 

[Carl Gross]

I think I have narrowed it down pretty diffinitively.

I looked at the Event Viewer and found there was a
service, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, that
has not been working, especially at startup. When I try
to start the service manually, I get the svchost.exe error.

Does that help? What can I do to fix it?

 

[XP User]

What is the error message in the event log?
BITS newsgroup is microsoft.public.windows.backgroundtransfer

 

[Jeff Roberts [MSFT]]

Carl,

Try this from a CMD window:

cd "%AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Network\Downloader"
ren qmgr*.dat *.broken
net start bits

If the service starts successfully, then the problem is most likely a bug in
parsing the BITS statefiles. Later versions, such as the BITS 1.5 package
available on www.microsoft.com, have fixed a couple such bugs.

It would be helpful if you can mail the renamed files to me at jroberts AT
microsoft.com, so that I can verify that the current version of BITS handles
this particular data properly. Although the files are binary, you might
want to browse them in Notepad to be sure they don't contain any
confidential info before sending them here.

If this doesn't fix the problem, please send more details of the eventlog
message.

Regards,
Jeff