lsass.exe problem finally solved (not malware related)

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by zopzop, Feb 16, 2009.

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  1. zopzop

    zopzop Registered Member

    Joined:
    Apr 6, 2006
    Posts:
    642
    I was having the following problems with my laptop for the past 1+ year : Every time I logged into an account on my Windows XP MC pc, lsass.exe would take up 100% of the cpu for a good 3 to 5 minutes and then return to normal. This made my logging into Windows take forever (as you can imagine).

    I googled around and posted in this forum and I always got the same answer : it's probably malware. I scanned with everything and it's mother (SAS, Malware Bytes, KAS, AVG, Avast, Dr. Web) and yet no malware was ever found. Some of the more exotic answers I got were things like : delete my prefetch (maybe it was corrupt), transfer my user information to a new user account then delete the old one (maybe it was corrupt), etc..

    None worked. I was so fed up I decided to just go ahead and reformat. Yesterday before I went through with the reformat, I decided to google around one last time. This is what I found :
    http://forums.prophecy.co.za/f10/lsass-exe-windows-encryption-22567/

    I won't even pretend to say I understand what's going on there but the poster recommended finding and deleting the following directory :
    C:\Documents and Settings\problemuser\Application Data\Microsoft\Protect
    (where "problemuser" is the name of the user account having the lsass.exe issues, for me it was both my admin and user account).

    I usually wouldn't delete a directory without understanding what it does but since I was going to reformat anyway, I decided what the heck, let me do it.

    I deleted the directory in both my accounts and restarted the pc. Care to guess what happened? The lsass.exe problem was GONE!

    I just wanted to share this solution with members on this forum who may have been having a similar problem. I never seen this solution suggested either.
     
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