CPU at 100%, first due to ekrn.exe, now egui.exe. Help!

My Toshiba laptop running Windows XP has been crawling since yesterday, around the same time I got a message that my ESET Antivirus software would be expiring soon. (Not sure if there's any relation, but I thought I'd mention it.) CPU was at 100% largely due to ekrn.exe.

I went ahead and renewed my license, got notified that there were updates to Windows that I needed to install, installed them, and I'm still having CPU-at-100% problems, this time due to egui.exe. Plus my ESET Antivirus program doesn't seem to recognize that I've renewed, despite my having entered the new user name and password multiple times.

Help!

 

RosiePiller,

Please try the server recommended settings and let us know . If your CPU goes down.

http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?page=content&id=SOLN2144

Cheers!

 

The same happened to me last night but only at start-up (ekrn.exe was the process) .I had to uninstall it.


Windows xp sp2,P4 3Gb,1Gb RAM.

 

I wound up uninstalling and reinstalling it, so I guess I lost my previous settings. :-( It didn't get any better after reinstalling, so I followed Danny T's suggestions (the page showing the recommended settings for servers or computers serving as servers). I'm afraid it's not any better. My system is still crawling.

Also, Danny T's suggestions raised a few more questions:
1) My laptop is not a server (at least I don't think it is). Should I still have followed those recommended settings?
2) In Step 5 - Email Protection > Email Clients, if I clear those checkboxes, does that mean incoming mail is not scanned for viruses?
3) In Step 6, there was no Enable email checking option. For POP3, POP3S, there was instead an Enable POP3 protocol checking, which I left checked.

So my laptop is still not working properly!
Rosie

 

First of all, make sure the problem disappears after disabling real-time protection. Then limit scanning to exe files only instead of all files in the real-time protection setup to exclude the possibility that it's a large text file that is continually being scanned and thus causing higher cpu utilization. In the past we were reported a particular application continually writing debug information to an html file. After excluding that file from scanning, the cpu utilization went back to normal. You can narrow it down to the problematic file(s) by using Process Monitor from Microsoft to monitor file operations performed by ekrn.exe.

 

With all of the problems being reported like this, wouldn't it make sense to add a little 'Status' button in the ESET admin panel, so you could see what every ESET process was actually doing? Ie, if it was scanning a huge file, let it tell you that - isn't the application itself the best way to find out what it is doing?

 

That has been suggested by me before. I even suggested for it to alert the user that some process/file is making ekrn.exe using more CPU than it should.

When will Eset understand that not every user is technical enough to look at some info provided by Process Monitor and the likes?

Get real! Lets be honest with each other. Does Eset really think that all their users have the capability of understand of what is being shown by Process Monitor and the likes? NO! Period!

Do your job for once.

 

I'm still in a world of hurt. My laptop is all but unusable, still. I haven't gotten responses to the 3 questions I asked the other day, namely:
1) My laptop is not a server (at least I don't think it is). Should I still have followed those recommended settings?
2) In Step 5 - Email Protection > Email Clients, if I clear those checkboxes, does that mean incoming mail is not scanned for viruses?
3) In Step 6, there was no Enable email checking option. For POP3, POP3S, there was instead an Enable POP3 protocol checking, which I left checked.

Also, when you say "limit scanning to exe files only instead of all files in the real-time protection setup," do you mean under "Real-time file system protection," click the "ThreatSense engine parameter setup" Setup button and remove all but the EXE extensions from the list? Aren't there non-exe files that could cause problems?

The problem does not go away when I disable real-time protection during startup since the program still goes through its start-up scan.

Thanks in advance,
Rosie

 

AFAIK startup scan is performed during boot process, and after every signature update

 

Right, I mean exactly that. However, unticking the "Scan all files" option should suffice. Does the problem go away then?