Looking at an XP Pro SP3 desktop yesterday/today and soon after booting, the startup of the Automatic Updates service (wuauserv) is just killing it, using up all RAM and stalling everything due to all the swapping. Machine has only 512MB, but this is not a question that must be answered with "add memory" until I understand what is going on with Automatic Updates.
Looking at the \Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb file, that file is about 170MB, and not coincidentally, 170MB is the peak VM size I saw for both wuauclt.exe and the svchost.exe used by wuauserv. So I stopped wuauserv, renamed the datastore.edb, started up wuauserv and did a wuauclt /detectnow, and it created a new datastore.edb of the same 170 MB size as before. Looking at my own XP machine, datastore.edb is about 6 MB. And, I'm not finding much with google for "large datastore.edb" or "huge datastore.edb". The usual AU problem has been pegged CPU, but the CPU isn't pegged because of all the swapping. Anybody? TIA, Carl ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
