99% CPU at boot

Having re-installed Windows XP SP@ and MS Office 2003 on an IBM laptop (T42,
Pentium M 1.7 and 1GB of RAM) during boot I noticed that the svchost carrying
wuauclt.exe is using up 99% CPU, slowing the system down to a crawl. This
goes on for 30 seconds to a full minute after which the machine is usable
again. This is the same thing that happens when manually running the windows
update from the site.

This started happening after enabling the 'new and improved' windows update
(Microsoft update) that will attempt to update all Microsoft software. I
checked this on another system and that's showing the exact same problem now.
It seems as if the windows update process is so 'busy' doing all kinds of
processing and IO that no other process can run.

I checked the previous discussions on this, but didn't see it draw to a
conclusion. What causes this new windowsupdate software to be so slow, and is
there any news about a fix from Microsoft for this?

I don't mind windows update running in the background, as long as I can
still work normally with the system. Is there perhaps some way to
automatically lower the process priority so that at least all other programs
can start?

Try deleting the contents of this folder (or the folder itself) & reboot:

C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore

If no joy, try deleting the contents of this folder (or the folder itself) &
reboot:

C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution
--
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-Windows (IE, OE, Security, Shell/User)

Pieter-Bas wrote:
> Having re-installed Windows XP SP@ and MS Office 2003 on an IBM laptop
> (T42,
> Pentium M 1.7 and 1GB of RAM) during boot I noticed that the svchost
> carrying wuauclt.exe is using up 99% CPU, slowing the system down to a
> crawl. This goes on for 30 seconds to a full minute after which the
> machine
> is usable again. This is the same thing that happens when manually running
> the windows update from the site.
>
> This started happening after enabling the 'new and improved' windows
> update
> (Microsoft update) that will attempt to update all Microsoft software. I
> checked this on another system and that's showing the exact same problem
> now. It seems as if the windows update process is so 'busy' doing all
> kinds
> of processing and IO that no other process can run.
>
> I checked the previous discussions on this, but didn't see it draw to a
> conclusion. What causes this new windowsupdate software to be so slow, and
> is there any news about a fix from Microsoft for this?
>
> I don't mind windows update running in the background, as long as I can
> still work normally with the system. Is there perhaps some way to
> automatically lower the process priority so that at least all other
> programs
> can start?