Thank you William Balluff for your hotfix, that indeed made things a lot better. I just went ahead and disabled Microsoft Update as well, as it does take an enormous amount of resources and it was killing our older machines with 256mb ram (I would have never ordered machines with such low memory, they were here when I came here). Thank you again everyone, I had been looking for solutions to this for a very long time, the missing piece was the Microsoft Update which I had enabled on a few machines. To the person who suggested Hijack this, thank you too, but that didn't show anything out of the ordinary, these are fairly clean machines, and it won't work if Microsoft causes the problem. A quick note on Steve Andre's linux commentary, while Linux has grown up a lot, it's still not there yet. I've tried the latest live CDs for both Ubuntu and and Knoppix, and when you figure out that you have to install the WPA supplicant just to get wireless working on a notebook, that's a huge barrier to entry. We have to deal with computers all day for work, and I don't know about you, but when I get home for the day, I want it to just work, and Windows most of the time, just does. Having all these linux resources among what seems to be many distributions is annoying, I wish they would all concentrate their resources together and unite behind one distribution and make a killer product. Peter Thomas P. Carter wrote: > For us, the issue was a problem mainly on computers that are a little > "long-in-the-tooth". If Microsoft Update was installed (which is the > embellishment to Windows Update which looks for MS Office updates as > well as ones for Windows), one of the instances of svchost.exe that was > running would take 100% of the CPU time and the system would be > > > Thomas P. Carter, Ph.D. > > -----Original Message----- > From: MSU Network Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On > Behalf Of Balluff, William > Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 4:31 PM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] speaking of Vista...XP problem > > There is a hotfix out for this now. > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927891/ > The Microsoft Knowledge Base article 916089 explains the problem. > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916089/ > > We have used it on a couple machines with success. > The problem is related to Microsoft updates. Before the update, we had > >