Excessive disk and CPU usage by WUDFHost.exe

Hi Alan,

This can be caused if any of the program is accessing this specific program, hence we need to first find out which program is causing this issue.

WUDFHost.exe is an executable file (a program) for Windows. The filename extension .exe is the abbreviation for executable. Only run executable files from publishers you trust, because executable files can potentially change your computer settings or harm your computer.

I would suggest you to perform a clean boot and check if it helps.

Clean boot will check if any third party application is causing the issue, as clean boot helps in eliminating software conflicts.

How to troubleshoot problem by performing clean boot in Windows: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135        

Note: Once you are done with the troubleshooting, perform the steps in “How to reset the computer to start as usual after troubleshooting with clean boot “to reset computer as usual.

Hope it helps.

If you have any other questions or you need any other information about Windows, feel free to post your questions and we will be glad to help.

I don't know what happened, but everything seems to be working again.

In Device Manager the external disks were represented three times, under Disk Drives, Portable Devices and Storage Controllers. Now that everything is working, the entries under Portable Devices have disappeared. What caused this I don't know.

Thanks for all the help.

OK, I have isolated the problem. When the external disks are seen under Portable Devices in Device Manager, WMP tries to synchronise with them. As both of the external disks are 4TB each as you can imagine this would take some time, meanwhile putting the CPU under stress. As a workaround I am uninstalling the Portable Devices after every boot.

However, I would like to know how to tell WMP to ignore the external disks or be able to tell Windows not to consider the disks as Portable Devices. I can find no options in the player. Can anyone help with this?

Edit: I have found it better to disable the external disk entries under Portable Devices rather than uninstall them. It saves having to re-uninstall when reconnecting the disks.

Hi Alan,
 

I thank you for the valuable information you provided.

Gracias amigo mi ayudaste a solucionar el mismo problema, entre al administrador de dispositivo y desabilite todo referente al WUDFHost.exe o dispositivos portátiles, ya que todos los discos duros me los detectaba como unidades portátiles y apenas abría wmp se me saturaba el sistema.

Thanks my friend helped solve the same problem, the device manager and disabling the benchmark to WUDFHost.exe or portable devices because all hard drives detected me as portable units and just opened wmp me the system was saturated.

windows 8.1 enterprise español 64 bits

Using the Resource monitor, I was able to verify that the WUDFHost.exe did not start until I started Windows Media Player. I am on Windows 8.1 x64 and simply ended the process which did nothing more than stop the WUDFHost module. WMP just continued to play and I saw no other impact during many long sessions. Using a different media player (e.g. Zune)  does not seem to start the app. I would like to disconnect, disable or plug in a fix as I am lazy and like the WMP well enough.  I did notice that one of my external drives was identified and a  portable device and was stopped by windows:

 Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)

Drivers are up to date and that drive is no connected to WMP anyway.

Just for the record, I ran into this same problem (WUFDhost.exe consuming 24-29% of CPU all the time) on my Dell Venue 11 Pro 7139 running Windows 10 (Build 9926). My micro SD card showed up under Portable Devices, and as soon as I disabled that driver and rebooted, usage levels dropped to normal. It didn't affect access to the SD card, either. Great recommendation: thanks!

--Ed--

When I went to Device Manager to search for Portable Devices, I didn't see any. But about once per second the entire Device Manager tree disappeared and was redrawn, as if the system continually thought a new device had been attached or detached and had to refresh the display. It happened forever -- until I killed the WUFDhost.exe process -- then the Device Manager window I already had open immediately stopped refreshing, and the CPU usage dropped to near zero.

But this process seems to restart itself frequently, so this isn't really a fix or adequate workaround. I don't have any idea what device might be contributing to the trouble (if any) since I have no SD card and no other external device plugged in when or before this occurs.

Surface Pro 2, running Windows 10.

Windows 10, on a i7 with 16gigs of ram.  This darn process managed to weigh down my computer.

Listed in Task Manager as: WINDOWS DRIVER FOUNDATION

Actual Program: C:\Windows\System32\WUDFHost.exe 

I was having issues with: WUDFHost.exe  Using lots of Hard Disk usage on a drive that Windows Media Player had no reason to access.  Causing 3 or 4x the load times in my games.

I play lots of Audiobooks, but I play them off my Flash drives to save milage on my HDD's, but I noticed when I turned my book on, my games took forever to load, even though Windows Media Player was playing a file off a USB Flash drive.

So I googled similar issues and found this very thread, thank you for posting your trials. I thought I'd share my FIX

I Also found out that End Task'ing WUDFHost.exe had no effect on my Audio book.  I don't pretend to know what it does exactly but I am Really Sick of this process so I tried Renaming it to WUDFHost.exe.old so I could see if it had any lasting effect on my system. 

Unfortunately you cannot rename things in System32, I again Google'd how to rename things in System32 and found this Very Helpful: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/how-to-delete-a-system-file-in-windows-vista/

Again I Strongly urge you to rename system files to like .old instead of deleting them so you can very easily undo it later on. Follow the same steps for deleting but just rename it instead. The command I used at the end was: C:\WINDOWS\system32>rename WUDFHost.exe WUDFHost.exe.old

This has resolved my load times in my games. I will try to post an update if it has bad effects on something  :)