Why does Store Broker (wshost.exe) keep killing my CPU?

Anonymous

I've got a new Windows 8 machine and, for some reason, the Store Broker keeps pegging my CPU. It seems to pop up every time I do anything with the Windows Store (makes sense) or use some Metro apps (also makes sense). However, for some reason, this process takes up 33% of my CPU and never lets go of it once it starts. This causes the machine to get hot which causes the fan to come on and the combination drastically reduces my battery life (from 11hrs to 3).

Aside from frequently checking for and killing this app, is there anything else I can do about this? Is anyone else having this problem? Is it a misconfiguration on my end? I'm running this on a new Surface Pro 2.

Thanks!

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Anonymous

I SOLVED this. At least for myself. It's been a 3-day journey. Argh!

The upshot is this:

Kill Store and Store Broker from task list.

Rename the Cache folder to CacheOld at:

C:\Users(Your User Account)\AppData\Local\Packages\WinStore_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState

(Your WinStore_gobblygook might be a different bunch of gobbblygook)

Create an empty folder called Cache.

Solved! For me anyway.

Enjoy,

Ron

I have been at this for days. I've read every article and post everywhere. I have updated graphics drivers, set date and time, run wsreset, sfc /scannnow, created new user account (store did work for new account), app troubleshooter, etc, etc, etc...

Today I just started digging around and looking at dates. I don't have log files to back this up but I believe I broke Store with CCleaner. I'm not sure exactly when the Store broke so this is a best guess but it makes some sense since Ccleaner does clean Store cache.

I also recently installed Tor Browser but my gut is that that was totally unrelated.

I might create a sandbox user and try to break Store with Ccleaner to confirm. But honestly I am tired of this little adventure.

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220 additional answers

Anonymous

2014-02-05T13:41:45+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion.

I've gone ahead and run the command and I, unfortunately, subsequently watched the Store Broker process pop up and suck down another 30% of the CPU. I'm going to wait with it for a little bit to see if maybe it'll go back down this time, but in the meantime: can you explain why you think this could work? What do you think could be happening that this command could potentially fix? I'm new to PowerShell, but it appears you are trying to escalate the processes privileges - do you think this might be a sort of race condition where it keeps trying to perform certain tasks that it does not have permissions to perform?

Thanks!

Update: this does not seem to have worked. My CPU never dropped back down and I had to kill Store Broker,
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Anonymous

2014-02-05T11:40:13+00:00

Hi,

We may try to re-register the Windows Store app by running this command:

Open the command prompt with admin privileges, and type the following command:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\WinStore\AppxManifest.xml
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Anonymous

2014-02-05T01:59:37+00:00

I was wrong. It is not triggered by Chrome. This is with a clean boot as per the instructions.

This keeps happening. Everyday.

Help please, Microsoft.
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Anonymous

2014-02-04T20:45:45+00:00

Heck cant even use store for anything not even browsing, installing updates MS fix this!! :X
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