Windows 7 has High CPU Usage and slow performance

I found that when windows media center tried to build a picture and music library it included a lot of root directories.  Immediately following, my system slowed down, because wmpnetwk.exe started eating up the CPU resources.  Clearing out all the root directories from the picture and music libraries of windows media center helped, as did disabling the wmpnetwk.exe service in services.msc.  I would try trimming the libraries first before disabling the service in services.msc.  So peter_webfobe solution was spot on.  It's a shame because one of major break through's of Windows 7 was this media sharing issue.  It's in all their commercials-- playing movies on TVs and sharing media in a home network.  Hopefully they pay attention and fix the resource issue caused by this much acclaimed and promoted service.

I think the answer might be the Windows Media Player and Windows Media Network Sharing Services as zxypher suggested.  The fix for that is to adjust were the Windows Media Player services search for media files. 

It seems to be a bad problem for me as well upgrading from Vista to Windows 7.  The default search location for media is set to C:\Users\ instead of down in the My Music folders.

Go into Media Player.  From the menu -> File -> Manage libraries -> select each library (music, video, pictures, recorded tv [if you have]) and check the paths that it is managing and make sure it is not too close to the root of the C: drive.  For example, it should be something like c:\users\Jim\Music and c:\users\Public\Music BUT NOT **** c:\users as they will cause the whole directory tree to be re-indexed over and over (when you surf the web or change any files in your profile).

If you have multiple users who login to the computer, you may need to repeat the process for each user if all users have added managed folders which are actively changing on a regular basis.

If this is your issue and you do it correctly, then the high CPU should drop in minutes (or seconds down to nothing).

This is the CORRECT way to adjust the WMNSS/WMPNetwk.exe process issues.

A little more information can be found here:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7performance/thread/2fe4901b-2eaf-4a99-b487-e6a6213b10b3/ 

Thanks for your answer here my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo has been doing the same thing ever since I put Windows 7 on it, I just deleted all the Libraries in the media player & it's running cooler now!! Thanks very much once again... my computer was being fried by the media player!!!

Check in you task manager if you have intensive programs running. Kill the process and you will have a lower cpu usage

Hello-

I think that I have a partial solution for the freezes.

Turned out there was a hijack trojan that uses windows sharing to eat up all avalible space and cpu.

Try this:

download malbyteware [free] from cnet.

run the quick scan

see if the pc is infected with a hijack type malware

remove the bad software and run again

in parallel - open the performance window to the overview tab

order the processes with highest cpu % at the top

click on the process - it will show up in orange in the resource output on the graphs

terminate the process and watch it rise again

disable the process - it will still start up but will be stopped

check out the threads spawned by the process.

on my pc, wcmnetwk? ran away with all the resources.

now its running ok except for outlook hogging resources so on to that one next.

Good luck

H