A couple days ago I booted up my laptop and it quickly became unusable. The weirdest thing is that I could slooooowly interact with the start menu, but no new programs would launch. It was a total mystery to me since I hadn't recently installed anything or updated any drivers and it happened like clockwork shortly after startup.

I discovered there was a short window immediately after startup during which I actually could start programs. First, I got Task Manager started and saw that an svchost.exe process started chewing up 100% of the processor time.

Since I couldn't even restart Windows, I cut the power, rebooted, and started Process Explorer the next time. Process Explorer has a great feature that lets you take a look at each thread in a process and even inspect each thread's stack. The one busy thread seemed to be running code in a DLL I tracked back to Automatic Updates.

After I narrowed down the problem, a few searches turned up various suggestions for how to fix it. The one that worked for me was to disable Microsoft Update and only use Windows Update. I had to get Task Manager running and kill svchost.exe before going to the Windows Update site to make the change. If you're experiencing the same problem, go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and hit Change Settings to disable Microsoft Update. You won't get Office updates automatically anymore, but you'll actually be able to use your computer.

Posted by JoshC at September 14, 2006 6:59 PM

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