Ekrn.exe freezing OS [Windows 7]

Ok starting a few hours ago Ekrn.exe started freezing my computer. It's still midly operational when it starts messing up at first until I try loading a new process or tryin to do some other miscellanious task which locks it up almost completely, leaving me with with a frozen computer where the only thing that moves is the mouse with a permenant loading circle until I to a hard reboot.

After rebooting a few times i kept the task manager open to see what process might be causing this. And what I found out is that right when it freezes everytime is that Ekrn.exe is using up 50% CPU usage and 300MBs+ of memory. Keep in mind that the freezing is at random within 10 minutes of the OS loading up.

I've managed to stop it by going turning Ekrn.exe off start-up through msconfig and changing Eset to manual start-up in services.msc. It has yet to happen again so far. Again, this started at random, I did nothing to Eset before it started.


Any ideas what's happening? Only thing I can think of is a bad module or something.

I'm using Eset v5 on Windows 7 64-bit Pro.

 

Exact same problem here, started literally less than an hour ago. Within 15 minutes of a boot ekrn.exe jumps up to 25 CPU and the entire system locks, can't even bring up task manager at that point.

 

Does disabling HIPS or automatic real-time protection start followed by a computer restart makes a difference?

 

Sounds like the problem I've had here:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=314519

You can wait for ekrn.exe to finish its business, should take about 10 minutes. But I'd suggest to do what Marcos says to find out what the problem is or what fixes it.

Personally, I'm waiting till around the 19th to see if this problem comes up again (it seems to be a monthly thing) so I can properly capture it with procdump and check the other stuff that Marcos suggested in that thread.

 

I tried waiting for a bit and sure enough... after around 10 or so minutes of waiting it, stopped. Not sure what's causing this though. Quite a significant little issue.

 

What's the size of your file "C:\ProgramData\ESET\ESET NOD32 Antivirus\local.db" ?