Thanks for the info! I've opted out of Microsoft Updates as you and PA Bear have suggested. Keeping my fingers crossed that everything works normally tomorrow!
wuaudt.exe is really bogging down my computer
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Anonymous
Recently, when I first start my computer for the day, wuaudt.exe runs and really bogs down my computer. In Task Manager it shows it is using a lot of memory along with one of the many svchost.exe's that are running. I had my computer set up to notify me when updates are available. I have investigated this problem and found about the only thing to do is disable automatic updates altogether. I have turned off Automatic Updates, unchecked Automatic Updates under the Services tab in msconfig and in services.msc I have set Automatic Updates to manual. This seems to keep wuaudt.exe from running. I read in one place that Microsoft issues updates on the first and third Tuesday's of each month so I plan on doing manual updates at those times. Does anyone know why wuaudt.exe is suddenly such a memory hog? It only seems to be a problem the first time I time turn my computer on (I turn it off when not in use to save electricity). If I shut it off and restart it later in the day, there is not a performance problem. I have a Dell Dimension 5100C, Windows XP Pro SP3, 512 MB RAM, Pentium 4 3.00 Ghz processor.
I would like to be able to be notified of critical updates when they are issued but I don't want wuaudt.exe running every day if it is going to bog me down. Any ideas?
Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures
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Anonymous
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
Update: Due primarily to exchanges with several MS MVPS on the behalf of users like you, Microsoft is aware of and has acknowledged the issue:
"We have gotten reports from multiple sources and consider this to be a live service issue and we are investigating it as a Priority 1."
~Robear Dyer (PA Bear) ~ MS MVP (IE, Mail, Security, Windows & Update Services) since 2002 ~ Disclaimer: MS MVPs neither represent nor work for Microsoft
163 additional answers
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Anonymous
2010-09-14T14:34:32+00:00 I'm still getting the wuaudt.exe memory drain after re-enabling MS Update. I let it do its thing and rebooted twice but to no avail. I understand the detection logic is stored locally and after an initial scan the cache is to be cleared and going forward all should be well. Is there a way to make sure this cache is cleared or a way to manually clear it?
I'm hoping a patch for this issue will be included via Windows Update (which is working fine) which will allow the MS Update to function properly. We have a lot of Windows XP w/ SP3 systems running in our organization with their MS Update feature turned off waiting for a fix.
Same thing is happening to me. The scan has run, rebooted, scanned a second time, and it's still slow.
How do I manually clear this detection logic cache?
*edit* I deleted my SoftwareDistribution folder, and ran microsoft update again. It took over an hour to scan for updates, and didn't find any critical updates.
So I installed a few optional ones, just to make it go through the process. Ran miscosoft update again, and it's still using a ton of memory and making my system pretty much unusable. I finally gave up, and stopped the wuauserv service so I could get some work done.
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Anonymous
2010-09-14T04:48:09+00:00 as per this post which i don't appear to see in this thread:-
"Another user, yphilj , has replied to a thread you have subscribed to in the Windows Update Forum.
Thread Titlewuaudt.exe is really bogging down my computer
Started by: tedley318
Reply:
I'm still getting the wuaudt.exe memory drain after re-enabling MS Update. I let it do its thing and rebooted twice but to no avail. I understand the detection logic is stored locally and after an initial scan the cache is to be cleared and going forward all should be well. Is there a way to make sure this cache is cleared or a way to manually clear it?
I'm hoping a patch for this issue will be included via Windows Update (which is working fine) which will allow the MS Update to function properly. We have a lot of Windows XP w/ SP3 systems running in our organization with their MS Update feature turned off waiting for a fix."
I spent 4 hours manually receiving updates from Microsoft Updates and installing them yesterday and restarted my machine several times. After this time no more updates were found and on start up and while searching for Microsoft Updates wuauclt.exe still hogged the memory and caused my machine to be un-responsive.
While Microsoft have obviously done something which has helped me receive the manual updates required, the cache still needs to be cleared or something as per the post above.
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Anonymous
2010-09-13T22:13:51+00:00 I'm still getting the wuaudt.exe memory drain after re-enabling MS Update. I let it do its thing and rebooted twice but to no avail. I understand the detection logic is stored locally and after an initial scan the cache is to be cleared and going forward all should be well. Is there a way to make sure this cache is cleared or a way to manually clear it?
I'm hoping a patch for this issue will be included via Windows Update (which is working fine) which will allow the MS Update to function properly. We have a lot of Windows XP w/ SP3 systems running in our organization with their MS Update feature turned off waiting for a fix.