Random scans and CPU hogging.

I am running ESS 4.2 on Windows 7 64Bit.

I had it setup to run a weekly in depth scan at 03:00am and with the option Wait until next scheduled time selected. This was working fine for a few weeks but now I have a problem.

For some unknown reason, one day it started doing a scan at 10:00am, I stopped the scan but this left the ekern.exe process using 50+% of my CPU time. The only way to resolve this is to restart the PC.

I removed the scheduled scan completley but it is still starting scans at random times and stopping them leaves CPU at 50+ %

I have now uninstalled and reinstalled ESS and didn't set up any scheduled scans after reinstall but it still starts an in depth scan at random times.

Any idea how I can stop this as having to restart the PC to stop high CPU usage is getting a real pain. ??

 

Try to use the official uninstaller for the eset products to make sure that all files and registry entries are deleted from your system.

here is the link:
http://kb.eset.com/esetkb/index?pag...earch&viewlocale=en_US&searchid=1267667759933

I recommend you to run this and then perform a clean installation of the product.

On the other hand the high CPU usage can relate to some deadlock in the ekrn scanner. Try to run procmon from (originaly) sysinternals, the link is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx and run ondemand depth scan, in the log you can then look for a file that will be accessed continuously by ekrn process.

maybe then excluding that file may help...

 

I would suggest that you wait for an ESET Moderator or ESET Support to answer your query. You may also submit an issue ticket to ESET.

 

Couldn't it be that the on-demand scans are fired off remotely by ERA? There's no reason for EAV/ESS to run on-demand scans randomly except startup scans that are run after each update or the system startup silently in the backgroung. However, these scans only check files that are run / loaded on system startup.

 

Also do not forget that after every virus database update, the whole system is rescanned - this may be considered as "randomly started". So I guess that the problem will be in some file that deadlocks the scanner.

 

Haven't had a chance to do a reinstall after using the uninstaller yet, will give it a try later.

Thanks for replies guys.

 

Well I finally got round to running the uninstaller and reinstalling but I'm still getting random scans and +50% CPU time.
The scanner doesnt seem to get stuck on any particular file, seems to be running fine, but when I try to stop the scan it says it's stopped but is still using 50% cpu.