ProfSvc consumes 100% of a thread in win 8.1

Hi,

I'm running win 8.1 -- not sure exactly when this started -- this is an upgrade from win7->win8. I notice my CPU frequency never drops below max anymore. I've traced this back to svchost.exe/netsvcs. Setting affinity to a single core gives me 1 core at 100% all the time.

I've tried creating another user profile & logging in under a cold boot as that admin user -- no change. I've tried uninstalling antivirus software -- no change. Booting to safe mode (even with networking) does get me back down to idle. I'm able to suspend svchost.exe (netsvcs) in resource monitor and see the cpu go back to idle.

Any guesses for next steps to resolve this? Best guess I'd had was a new user profile, but that was unsuccessful, so I'm at a loss at what else to try. A screenshot of resource monitor is below. Any advice would be greatly appreciated..thanks!

    - Joe

 

Question Info

Last updated February 12, 2018 Views 402 Applies to:
Answer

Of course I'd sort it out right after posting...

I used process monitor to figure out what it was doing. Turns out an infinite loop of looking for HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\CustomLocale\virtualization. I tried creating that as an empty string, and then it polled for C:\Windows\Globalization\virtualization.nlx.

Turns out this is a broken Intel Proset driver. Removed it & the system is back to normal. Who would have figured a network driver would spam a user profile service? Sigh....

    - Joe

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