wicainventory. exe causes high CPU usage

I turned off the customer experience option as well.

I also looked at Malwarebytes to see if I could add Wicainventory.exe to a list of known malware, but no such luck. I would tend to classify as malware anything that I did not ask to be installed, and causes performance problems with my computer, and that cannot be removed through the Control Panel. Same for GWX.exe

I can't get rid of this thing. I have deleted win updates, turned off all windows customer experience programs.

It still start scanning my disks at random times, not only at startup.

When I do a thorough search I find wicainventory.exe in 16 different location, but I can't delete any of them.

As it turns out, there are quite a few recent updates to Windows 7 which provide telemetry information to Microsoft. It could be that one of the others is responsible for what you're seeing.

If you haven't already done so, you must configure Windows Update for "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them". Instructions for how to do this are available at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-windows-update-installation-notification

If you don't do that, then every time you uninstall an update, Windows Update will promptly reinstall it.

Here is a partial list of Win7 telemetry updates:

KB2952664 - Adds Appraiser.dll, Creates new tasks for DoScheduledTelemetryRun. In this case, also check for the "scheduled tasks" and consider deleting them.

KB3021917 - "Telemetry is sent back to Microsoft"

KB3022345/3068708 - "This update introduces the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service"

KB3075249 - "This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature"

KB3080149 - "This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices"

KB3035583 - "This update installs the Get Windows 10 app, which helps users understand their Windows 10 upgrade options and device readiness"

One way to uninstall updates, which I find to be easier than searching through the list provided by the Windows Update GUI,

is to open a Command Prompt as Administrator, and type the following command:

WUSA /UNINSTALL /KB:#######

replace ####### by the actual number of the update you want to remove.

Several of the updates listed above depend on one another. If you delete them in numeric order, the dependent updates will be silently deleted along with them, so subsequent uninstalls might complain that the specified update is not installed. That's OK.

After all of the unwanted updates have been uninstalled, reboot the computer.

After rebooting, run Windows Update. It will report that several updates are pending, including some (but not all) of those listed above and some additional ones (e.g. 2882822 -- Update adds ITraceRelogger interface support to Windows Embedded Standard 7 SP1, Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1). Presumably the latter are updates which were dependent on the updates which were explicitly deleted.

Right click on each of those updates and select "hide update" so that Windows Update will not offer to install them again.

Unfortunately, it has been reported that Microsoft sometimes overrides "hide" when new variants of the same update are released, so you'll need to carefully review future updates before allowing them to be installed.

I hope this helps a little.

Thanks everyone here to point out the problem and the solution. During the last weeks my harddisk was always busy and my computer very unresponsive.

Only today I noticed the high CPU usage in wicainventory.exe and I followed the advice to uninstall the Update KB2952664.

Now the harddisk LED actually stays mostly off and I can use the computer again!