United Kingdom
Like a lot of people, a friend has been using M$ update instead of the normal Windows update.
For approx the last six months his pc has had intermitant freezes\crashes which a reboot has solved only for a relatively short period of time, but as he is a "low user" never complained to me until yesterday.
On testing found his cpu was running at 100%, which started after a few minutes, this was traced to svchost trying to initiliase Microsoft updates (including office 2003) over the internet.
After a bit of googling found this topic,
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/786004271831
if you like a never finding a complete answer, read it all.
If you just want the fix, look on page 7 and choose your flavour of xp.
Always nice to see M$ being so thorough, even if it does take them 6 months and not even a release onto there automatic updates, where the problem started in the first place.
As per the Thread, this apparently does not affect Windows update, only Microsoft update.
For approx the last six months his pc has had intermitant freezes\crashes which a reboot has solved only for a relatively short period of time, but as he is a "low user" never complained to me until yesterday.
On testing found his cpu was running at 100%, which started after a few minutes, this was traced to svchost trying to initiliase Microsoft updates (including office 2003) over the internet.
After a bit of googling found this topic,
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/786004271831
if you like a never finding a complete answer, read it all.
If you just want the fix, look on page 7 and choose your flavour of xp.
Always nice to see M$ being so thorough, even if it does take them 6 months and not even a release onto there automatic updates, where the problem started in the first place.
As per the Thread, this apparently does not affect Windows update, only Microsoft update.