Hi,

I apologise in advance if this has been covered and solved elsewhere before, I couldn't find anything that would suggest a possible cause in my searching.

I installed litestep on my XP SP2 machine at home over the weekend, and everything has been running fine since install.

However, I have come to work where I use win2k SP4, installed litestep, and I've found that svchost.exe will randomly use 99% cpu, then drop down to 0%. As I'm writing this, my work machine has been turned on for 1 hr, 13 mins, svchost.exe has a cpu time of 46 mins. System idle process has a time of 21 mins.

I'm currently running the default theme austerity, and I installed using omars OTS2 installer. I had this issue using the default install. I have since updated builds to 0.24.7, by downloading the latest zip, and running updatebuild, but this has not made any difference. I tried to recycle litestep, to see if that made any difference, but there was no change at all. This happens if I reboot as well.

I did have a similair problem running litestep on XP SP2 which was running under Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I attributed that to Virtual PC, but now I'm not so sure.

I have also installed nonstep (the theme I use at home on xp with no problems) and had the same issue.

Can anybody give me any clues or sources of information on this?

Thanks.

Restart your computer with explorer as the shell and see if you have any Windows Updates that want to be downloaded/installed. Also, try turning off Automatic Updates.

Hmmm, does win2k have "Windows Update" in it, or is that only on XP? Windows update can sometimes cause high CPU usage with LS.

Good question... haven't used 2k in quite some time.

Me either. I don't remember any more. And you beat me out for first response, too. Must learn to type faster.

As it happens, I do have some windows updates to install, I'm just too damned lazy to install them, seeing as they're only for OE, so I'll give that a go when I get to work in the morning.

2k does have windows update. I believe the old v5 web client is installed with sp3, as well as wupdmgr.exe et al.

Supposing installing the pending windows updates doesn't solve the issue, are there any other things I could be on the look out for?

Many Thanks for the pointer so far!

Regards,
Alex.

Installing the pending windows updates seems to have solved the problem. It hasn't re-occured since I installed them.

Thanks to all for the advice.

Just as a thought. is there anyway to ensure the windows update icon shows in the systemtray, or is that functionality dependant upon the module used?

I have never had that icon work in LS. If it does "appear" it disappears quite quickly and causes some real havoc on my config.

I have my tray set to 'beep' when it resizes, so when I hear it begin to beep twice for no apparent reason (icon appearing and then disappearing again), I know that it's Windows Update time. THat icon doesn't ever seem to stick properly though, no. The beeping is usually accompanied by intermittent spurts of high CPU activity as well.

hmmmm... I wonder if win update does that on my machine too... probably just dont notice it (good idea with the beeping ;) )

Yep does it on mine too. And the add-remove cycle is so quick that I end up with very messed up autosize systray/taskbar issues.


Everytime I do a reformat I forget what the problem is :P

It was Windows Update for me--which is odd, because automatic updates worked fine before I got an account on the new domain controller.