WMI Provider Host taking up all of CPU

Thanks for your reply my friend, I've been waiting to hear from you :)

You are too kind my friend, it is my honor to explain your confusion and help you! It has been my wish since childhood to help as many people as I can, and I would be happy if you just clicked “yes” at the bottom of my post!

1. First of all, some new information from you. It's not necessarily relevant from this point of view, as the boot may receive the following factors:

(1) The type of hard disk used, SSD, HDD, HHD. by far SSD is the fastest and widely used. Different hard disk types can cause variations in boot speed.

(2) Boot type, for example, in BIOS we use UEFI, LEGACY, UEFI/LEGACY and so on.

(3) You mentioned in your description about forcing it to shut down by long-pressing the power and delaying it for the fourth time before actually booting up. This is sometimes hardware related, sometimes system related and it is difficult to define the cause of the problem.

For example, my personal laptop, which I personally tested for you, sometimes has similar occurrences, but I think my laptop causes it to be hardware related. After all, it's been used for four years, but it's very well equipped :)

2. Thanks for always providing detailed information and videos.

I see that the problem is still “denial of access”, which I think is due to a so-called protection mechanism of third-party anti-virus software. Because the principle of anti-virus software is simply to protect our computers, but some viruses may try to shut down the service of the anti-virus software first after entering.

I think a clean uninstall of MB is a good choice for now.

However, I found that recently there are some malicious viruses will disguise as system level services to take up, please beware my friend!

3. Clean mode is generally what we use more for troubleshooting problems, because if the WMI problem doesn't recur in clean boot, we can rule out problems due to 3rd party software & drivers, and further narrow down the scope of the problem.

Searching the PID index in a way that we may not be able to find all matching processes through the Event Viewer, as some logged events may have duplicate PID numbers.

4. I am very glad that you share my curiosity and I am really happy to meet you who are willing to work together to solve the problem!

Downgrading to Windows 10 is indeed an effective method if you find other solutions cumbersome, but always remember to back up your data my friend!

Looking forward to your good news, I will always be here for you!

Thank you for your response.

It allows me to learn more about it.

May I ask do you normally use remote control, remote monitoring related functions?

If you don't, I think you can try to disable the WMI service temporarily.

Enter the following command in cmd.

net stop winmgmt

If you have time, I suggest you try a clean start. Because clean startup can be more efficient in troubleshooting problems that may be caused by third party software, drivers.

I will provide you with a link to another program for troubleshooting WMI performance issues, which you can try to troubleshoot and resolve with the program in the link.

Please refer to: Troubleshoot WMI high CPU usage issues - Windows Server | Microsoft Learn

I sincerely hope that the above solution will solve your problem. Please feel free to contact me if you have any problems or still can't solve them.

I look forward to hearing back from you. 

Best Regards

Arthur Sheng | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Hey Arthur, thank you for your follow up. I'm really frustrated by this problem as it just keeps coming back no matter what I do. Now even the system takes up a significant % of the CPU.

Attaching a link to when I clicked on "System" -> "Details" to see the constituents of System: https://gyazo.com/70fe8d2760341a5d456ae336266cb855

.

Also, today a really weird thing happened: Twice my PC froze with 100% CPU usage - WMI Activity going up to 75-80%, so I noted the time down to see the operational logs after my session ended. I was surprised to see that the time stamps I noted of actually didn't show up any errors for the time when my PC was literally frozen. I don't know what to make of it.

I tried the first step as of now and this is the response I got from CMD program:

Hi Gaurav Sood11

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

This is a very strange phenomenon and I understand very well how you feel, based on your description, I understand that your WMI takes up 80-90% of the CPU!

I'm glad you've tried some solutions, and commend you on your problem solving skills, thought process and execution!

I will give you some solutions or troubleshooting suggestions that you may not have tried before, and hopefully it will solve your problem successfully!

Option 1: Consider the possibility that a corrupted WMI repository is taking up more performance. So you can try to reinstall the WMI repository.

Click “Windows Logo Key” to open the search bar -> Enter “cmd” in the search bar and open it with administrator privileges -> Please enter the following commands

winmgmt /salvagerepository

winmgmt /resetrepository

Option 2: You can try to troubleshoot the possible cause of the problem by starting your computer cleanly.

You can refer to Clean Start: How to perform a clean boot in Windows - Microsoft Support.

After a clean boot, please scroll down the page to find “How to determine what is causing the problem after you do a clean boot”, which is actually a dichotomy to determine what services may be causing similar problems.

Disclaimer:  A “clean boot” starts Windows with a minimal set of drivers and startup programs. It helps to determine whether a background service is interfering with your game or program and to isolate the cause of a problem. These steps of "clean boot" might look complicated at first glance. However, to avoid any trouble for you, please follow them in order and step-by step so that it will help you get back on track.  

I sincerely hope that the above solution will solve your problem. Please feel free to contact me if you have any problems or still can't solve them.

I look forward to hearing back from you. 

Best Regards

Arthur Sheng | Microsoft Community Support Specialist