WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

Mark Schroeder:

Thanks for your post about WaasMedicAgent reading files from prior Windows 10 updates. Some earlier posts in this thread also mentioned issues about it reading old Windows Update files.

Some months ago, after each Windows 10 update (usually on 2nd week of the month), I started using the Windows Disc Clean utility to delete files listed as "Windows Update Cleanup". The steps are: Run disc clean utility....select Cleanup system files.... checkmark "Windows Update Cleanup" as one category of files for Disc cleanup to purge.

Since starting to do this every month, I have noticed that the WaasMedicAgent delays have been reduced from half hours and hours, to just a couple of minutes on my system, which has hard disk drive. Not sure purging the Windows Update Cleanup is the cause of the improvement, but I have not had the extremely long periods of system non-response that I used to have when Waas Medic Agent ran.

On a couple of occasions, Disc Cleanup showed that cleaning up Windows Update Cleanup files would save over 2 GB of disc space. After it ran, the category showed only a couple hundred MB of space left. If WaasMedic is reading those files, that could be one reason it takes so long.

Note that removing Windows Update Cleanup with Disc Cleanup is not fast. On my HDD system, it may take the utility 10 to 20 minutes to purge those files. But I get to choose the time to run Disc Cleanup, as opposed to WaasMedic popping up when I don't want it to.

I recommend everyone with this problem use the Disc Clean utility to process "Windows Update Cleanup" files after monthly Windows 10 updates.

Thanks very much this seems to have fixed the problem for me.

I ran "Windows Update Cleanup" a couple of days ago and it cleared approx 2.5GB of space.

WaasMedic Agent normally runs every Sunday on my machine (and sometimes other days) but today it didn't or if it did it ran so quickly I didn't notice it.

Out of interest I selected "Clean up System Files" again to see if Windows had replaced the Windows Update files but after calculating there was no option presented for Windows Update Cleanup.

Thanks again.

That's a good question. Why can't we disable WaaS even from an Admin account? You can shut it off temporarily with a Registry Hack but Windows will just turn it back on. You can end task from within the Task Manager every time it runs. For the record WaaS even runs on a fresh and fully updated install of 21H1 with no other software installed. It would run on my laptop for up to 20 minutes even with a fresh install of the latest and updated version of 21H1 making the system almost useless during that time which is why my laptop is now running Linux. M$ has basically turned WaaS Medic into malware for every system with a spinning hard drive.

Thanks very much

wmcole: The cumulative update preview updates get issued by MS near the end of the month. In theory it is optional. On my system is it listed as "optional" and gives me the option to download/install it or not. Sounds like for your system that preview update was downloaded but the installation failed. I believe update failures are linked to/cause waasmedic agent running, which slows system performance for some of us.

Selecting Windows Update Cleanup from disk cleanup would not normally cause problems, or cause a particular update to fail. I use that option of disk cleanup every month when I run disk cleanup prior to the regular 2nd Tuesday of the month MS update. On my HDD system, using Windows Update Cleanup does take a very long time to complete. I do not try to do anything else on my computer while I am running disk cleanup.

I disagree with your suggestion about not running windows update cleanup. But if you run it, you should expect that disk cleanup to take a while, particularly if your system uses a hard disk drive for its system disk.