wicainventory. exe causes high CPU usage

This is a nasty little demon from our friends at Microsoft. A good and necessary idea that has been implemented poorly.

It's purpose is to inventory your PC to know what you need for software upgrade into the Win8 path. It should have been made to only execute if a user request for suitability is made. But in this case based on what I've been able to find out the Windows Team pulled an Apple and treated all users as too stupid to know what  they want and when they will want it.

KB2952664  that installs WICAINVENTORY.EXE and two other 'wica' files, including a .dll, is not necessary for Win7. What I have done to get rid of it may be overkill, and may only last till the next update that doesn't say it's included but has it again.

1. Make sure your Windows Update is set to NOTIFY you when updates are available and not set to AUTOMATIC or the little beast will be reinstalled.
2. Uninstall KB2952664 using the Control Panel.
3. On my PC I found the three files to be in 9 different folders as this has been loading in updates once a month for 9 months. Use a search utility to find all instances.
4. You will have to go into the properties of each file and for each file you will have to make your user the owner of the file.
5. You will have to go into the properties of each file again and make Administrators or yourself have permission for FULL access of the file.
6. Now that your permissions are set, you can delete the files.
7. Soon, your Windows Update will notify you that KB2952664 is an important update. Select it and right click on it, and then mark it to be hidden. You won't see it again unless you ask windows to show you hidden update requests.

Like I said, this might be overkill, but... maybe not. What I have done to get rid of it may only last till the next update that doesn't say it's included but has it.

It's maybe even more bizarre, it seams to collects telemetry data and send it to Microsoft ?? or ...??.

It hides itself from the system, a simple find wica*.* in explorer will not find the file

However a Dos dir c:\wica*.* /s  will show lots of files belonging to it.

I cannt tell it also hides from active processes; it might be a stealthy peace of software.

I only detected it because comodo antivirus doesnt like its networking behaviour (tries to bypass firewall)

I wonder if this is allowed in the EU, (i doubt it) as EU privacy laws are pretty strong.

And even if a user has been shown a long vague euala text with something marginally mentioning it, still a users must have a clear option to opt-out of such programs.

(and not get them sneaky by windows update).

So far I failed to find an article describing it, and how to opt-out of it.

After an update windows will be slow for several minutes while background processes like this "Do Their Thing" . . . There is always something like this after a windows update. it takes 5 mins at most to complete, then it goes away. Stopping the process will most likely cause stability issues later down the line.

Best advice I can offer. Let your computer idle for 5 mins after installing windows updates. After that it should be back to normal.

You need to remove update KB2952664. It took me a couple of attempts, and I needed to set auto-update to not automatically install updates, but "let me choose" .  Finally wicainventory is gone.  I also had multiple instances of the .exe. I changed the owner from "trusted Installer " to myself and was able to delete them. Hope this helpes