There seems to be a surge in such problems, again, it's one of the quirks in Windows.
It's triggered by the Windows Update process, wuauclt.exe
But before that, take a look at your system processes first, to be sure that there are no malwares on your system.
Press
Ctrl + Shift + Esc to bring up the Task Manager.
Look for any processes that are taking up a lot of system resources, particularly svchost.exe.
If it is, do this favour for yourself:
Download
Process Explorer from Sysinternals. Save it to somewhere convenient and unzip it.
Run
procexp.exe. You will be prompted to read a license agreement. Read through it, accept the license agreement.
Click on File > Save As
Save it as a text file. Open the text file you've just saved. You should see something similar below:
code:
SVCHOST.EXE 1276 97.06 Generic Host Process for Win32 Services Microsoft Corporation
wuauclt.exe 2328 Automatic Updates Microsoft Corporation
wuauclt.exe 3640 Automatic Updates Microsoft Corporation
An explanation:
svchost.exe is just a generic process for Windows XP. It handles nearly everything for Windows, from the logging in to your internet connections.
wuauclt.exe is the process name for Windows Update. By default, it will start up on all XP systems automatically.
Red highlighted part - shows the amount of system resources used. In this case, 97.06% of the system resources are allocated to svchost.exe, which is actually triggered by Windows Update.
To solve this, make sure you have Windows XP SP2 installed.
For 32-bit usersDownload
this patch and save it to somewhere convenient and install it.
Reboot your computer.
For 64-bit usersDownload
this patch and save it to somewhere convenient and install it.
Reboot your PC.
Those maintaining Windows 2003 Server, kindly refer to
this knowledge base article.