I have run into this problem twice now so I thought I’d write up my fix for it in case other people are having the same issue. Hopefully you’ll spend less wasted time on it than I did!
Problem:
I am running Windows XP on a Macbook Pro via Bootcamp. I have Windows Updater set to only download updates and let me choose when to install them. The last few times I’ve had updates that downloaded but which I hadn’t chosen to install yet, my computer became nearly inoperable in two phases:
- Once the installs had downloaded, if I didn’t install them within 24 hours (left my computer running overnight) the OS would lock up and I would have to do a hard shut-down.
- Rebooting from that situation would trigger a new problem. The CPU would hover between 80% and 90% utilization with the System process (not System idle) causes the spike. The Explorer.exe process would also use up more than the normal amount of CPU and there would be an abnormal number of svchost.exe instances (6 or more) running as well that could not be terminated with Task Manager. Inspection with Process Explorer would show that Winlogon.exe was a major CPU hog under the System process. The computer would work, but very slowly and could not handle things like opening a virtual machine under any circumstances.
Fix:
I’m not sure why this works, but it seems to be something related to Bootcamp and the Windows Updates.
- Install all the Windows Updates you downloaded. This could take a while in the slow state the computer is in.
- Reboot into the OSX partition on your Mac
- Reboot into the Windows partition once again
If you just keep rebooting into Windows, you’ll have the CPU peg every time after installing the updates. I searched for two hours on Google and tried several different things with multiple Windows reboots with no luck. Accidentally rebooting into OSX and then back to Windows resolved the problem.
Hope that’s helpful to someone else out there!
