XP heavy disk activity

[mrbob969]

I have two XP systems, one a laptop running XP Pro, one a desktop running XP home.

The XP HOME system seems to have the activity at random times, lasting for minutes (hours?), but does not slow down other activities.

The XP PRO system has this problem only at startup, and continues for perhaps 45 minutes, when it behaves normally. Again, cpu shows as mostly idle. I have not yet examined the full list of starup processes, and will do so shortly.

I assume these are actually totally different problems...

I wonder how I can track down this problem? When heavy cpu or memory activity occurs, I turn to taskmgr, and soon enough can identify the culprits. What does one do for heavy disk activity?

[-pops-]

This could be Windows Indexing Service - a well known resource hog

I always turn it off as it doesn't seem to do very much except to appear to cause hard drives to work unnecessarily.

You can turn off the Indexing Service by

1. Go to 'Start > Control Panel'

2. Double-click on 'Add/Remove Programs'

3. Click the 'Add/Remove Windows Components' button

4. Uncheck the 'Indexing Services'

You can always turn it on again if you wish.

[andsome]

Mine was switched off six years ago with no ill effects. :D

[mrbob969]

Turning off indexing is a good idea, I wish I had thought of it myself.

Unfortunately, it is not the cause of either of my problems. It was indeed turned on on the laptop, and I have turned it off, with no visible effect whatsoever...it is not on on my desktop system.

[-pops-]

Are you connected to the Internet at startup when this occurs?

If yes, try booting with no Internet connection.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Try a utility like Process Monitor; it will most likely tell you what is doing all the disk I/O.

[mrbob969]

Try a utility like Process Monitor; it will most likely tell you what is doing all the disk I/O.

Well, I've tried booting with the Internet missing, it made no difference. It appears that the issue is LSASS.EXE is what's doing all the disk i/o, but that really does not help me much. Web searches indicate that others have this problem, and most are flailing around trying to pin it down...what next?

[Dencandy]

Just a thought mrbob969: are you sure its the hard disk working and not just the cooling fans (especially in the case of the laptop)?

[mrbob969]

Just a thought mrbob969: are you sure its the hard disk working and not just the cooling fans (especially in the case of the laptop)?

Thanks for the thought, but...the laptop fan is very distinctive, and this is a different sound. In any case, I can see in Task Manager that LSASS.EXE is reading and writing disk continuously (csrss.exe is also doing a lot of reads, but not as many as LSASS.EXE).

[Dencandy]

Have you done a back up recently of all your important data? If not I suggest you do one immediately as this looks like a difficult one.

There's a thread here: (http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt-2000-...ng-all-cpu.html) from another forum a few years back which seems to be about a similar problem. Unfortunately no definite solution is given but my my guess is the guy ended up doing a re-installation. There's also references elsewhere to a worm called lsass.exe. Have you done a deep virus scan to check? You've already done a search on LSASS.EXE so you will have seen some other suggestions.

Here's a possible solution to the csrss.exe problem: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555021 .

Since excessive running of these 2 exes seems to be associated with a corrupt user profile, try creating another admin user, log on with that and see if the problem still occurs. If it doesn't occur, the first admin profile is probably corrupt and you'll need to try to repair it or transfer all the data out of it into the new profile and delete the old one.

If the problem still occurs with a new admin user then it seems either you've got a seriously corrupt system or you may have the worm referrred to in some of the articles.