Hello,
I am newer here and perhaps not as technical as some, but I seem to have a problem that is related to this one. I will give some history to set benchmarking. I am running an HP pavilion dv4000. Earlier today I checked my memory. My Computer says 1.99 GB RAM, running Windows XP service pack 3
I got the Comcast version of Norton on April 25th. Prior, I was using an old educational version of McAfee, Spybot, AdAware, AdWatch, and Malawarebytes. The unload/reload got complicated by these facts. I found a phone number on Comcast that allowed me to talk to a nice guy in the Philippines. He remotely unloaded the competing software and loaded Norton.
The next morning I ran a full system scan. Nothing was found other than tracking cookies. The benchmarks: 2 hours 20 minutes, 1.214 million files scanned
Not too much to report until May 28th. The only thing to note was that I had the same loop mentioned here: The screen saver would start (Starfield), the computer/Norton interpreted that as "idle", the Norton background processes would start, the popup window would popup stopping the screen saver, the computer/Norton would interpret this as activity cancelling the background process, in a few minutes repeat! I basically ignored it and just didn't have a screen saver for a month.
Friday the 28th was different. Apparently, Norton got mad that I had not run another full system scan in more than some amount of time (True). It decided to run one as background. This caused my computer to max out the cycles and run the fan for hours. I could slowly play solitaire or read some message boards. After four hours, I quit all software allowing nothing but the background to run - although I am not sure it was running - for 45 more minutes. I have no access to the number of files scanned on the Background version of the full scan. I decided to quit and go to bed.
Saturday the 29th, I woke up, booted, started no software except Norton and initiated a full scan in the Foreground. I knew that a successful scan would create a timestamp to stop the background problem temporarily. Unfortunately, I am not sure that it was not running a background full scan at the same time. In any case, it was much slower. After 4 hours, I was only 220,000 files in with a million to go. Furthermore, it had slowed to a pace where I was able to read the file numbers change individually to someone I was talking to on the phone. 220,963 scanned...220,964 scanned. Clearly this would take days to run, plus my computer would burnout by then! I shut down and tried again. This time, it slowed to almost a halt at a mere 29,000 files.
I called Symantec and talked to three agents (at first, there will be a fourth later on). Most of them didn't seem to understand my history or the problem. The third one helped me to go into regedit (probably a mistake) and change one value that he claimed should help solve the problem from 0 to 1. For a short while, the speed was better, but in reality nothing much changed (more on this in two paragraphs).
I called again and talked to the fourth guy. He told me how to shut off all background processes. I followed the instructions and the fourth icon on the main Norton page is now gray. There should be no background processes. I restarted and things seemed fine... for a while. About 15 minutes in, ccsvchst.exe started using up all my cycles, running my fan at max. I checked Norton and the screen still claimed that background was shut off. But it would never stop running. Somehow, Norton was trying to do something (what?) in the background and it was never finishing.
I did notice one thing however that is true until now and was probably the aforementioned 'better period'. After starting up, if I kept the foreground busy, the ccsvchst never took over all my cycles. I tested it for an hour, playing games, moving the mouse, listening to YouTube, checking mail. As long as it never went idle, I was fine. If I allowed the computer to go idle, the ccsvchst would start its nasty business. And once it started down that path, the only way to stop it is to shut down. I've done the start-up/keep it busy/intentionally go idle/watch ccsvchst go carzy cycle another five times today.
The Windows Task Manager Performance tab window is quite pretty when ccsvchst goes crazy. The overall performace probably averages about 75% of my processors ability, but it is an interesting sinelike wave. It goes up and down (like a sine wave) but the metawave is like a sonic wave: it gets fatter and skinnier. Also, every once in a while, it will go to 100% for a minute or two then return to the sine behavior, but it never ends. Currently, I am about 3 hours in and it keeps doing it.
By the way, I can't seem to figure out how to change the idle time - I actually can't find a reference to the idle time - so I can't change it to less than my screen saver's three minutes. Not that I believe that such a change will stop my problem. I give it 50/50 that if I could complete a full scan that all of the bad behavior would go away...at least until a week (a month?) later when I better have run one again!
I will check this thread over the next few days to see what people think. It is a long weekend here in the US, so I need to give some time. Also I will be traveling at midweek for a couple weeks, so I might not get back quickly. Thanks for any help.
Sorry I typed so much,
Zelski (someone else is pogo here!)
[edit: Edit subject to reflect moved post.]