Hello everyone,
First, a big thank you to Matt Phillips for his assistance getting me up and running here with my first post.
I have Nortons Internet Security 2009 (unable to find the version number in help/about) that was upgraded a little under a year ago from NIS 2008. Over the past two months, with increasing frequency the "CCSvcHst.exe" file, on a completely random basis with no discernible pattern, will literally hijack my computer, and lock up the CPU with 99% usage. It can happen on any type of task, from clicking on a website link, to working with a word document offline, and one time it even locked up when I clicked on Nortons own "run live update".
My computer is an HP Pavilion Laptop running Windows XP Media Center Edition, Version 2002, SP3, AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology ML-34, 1.79 GHz processor, 1.00 GB RAM.
I am not running any other Nortons programs, and I am not using any additional external or internal drives beyond the system C: drive. I have made no configuration changes to my computer other than regular Windows OS automatic updates.
So far this is what I have tried:
Contacted Nortons online support and under their instructions, ran "services.msc" , cycling Nortons status from automatic to disabled and back to automatic, restart Nortons, and restart the computer. This cleared the problem for about 4 days and then it returned.
After researching this issue on the web, I tried one suggestion of disabling Nortons automatic live updates and running all updates and scans manually. This worked for about a week, but now the problem is returning and seems to be increasingly aggressive, hogging my CPU and slowing me down to a crawl. Only a restart will clear the problem, until it appears (inevitably) again.
My search for "CCSvcHost.exe - CPU usage" on Google returned over 66,000 hits. From reading many of these links, it is abundantly clear that this issue is a VERY WIDESPREAD PROBLEM affecting potentially thousands of Nortons customers.
The bottom line is I need a permanent solution to this problem, not temporary fixes, or I will have no choice but to cancel my Nortons subscription and go to a different security product, which I really DO NOT want to do.
I am a senior member, moderator and regular participant on the Avid Video Community Forum and know full well the value of a collective world wide group of users. We solve problems regularly for other video editors all over the world without the need for them to spend money on tech support. I'm hoping the same kind of thing can happen here, and a permanent fix can be found.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.
Best regards to the hive mind,
Larry