WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

One hour and counting for 100% disk usage. Can do work but everything VERY slow. E.g., click to open a web browser, go to kitchen, make a medium Americano with steamed milk from scratch (starting with grinding beans, packing portafilter....) return to computer, take a few sips of coffee and Oooo FINALLY, the browser opens!

CAUSES: The Flash removal update (totally unecessary) failures show every day from 2/17 until 2/22 when it ran successfully. (Failures probably due to Adobe forced removal - without my permission - in early Jan. There was nothing left to remove. (Actually, I think the fix is like the SECDRV thing - it is to prevent you from re-installing Flash as Adobe there is probably a licensing / royalties clash with the original rites owner for some of the underlying Flash tech which MS and Adobe don't want to pay, so users are the pawns that get sacrificed in the battle.)

But the bigger cause was that, during a "Disk Cleanup->Cleanup System Files" operation I selected "Windows Update Cleanup" (4.6 GB's worth of supposedly no longer needed files) during my last session yesterday. Then today - damn near unusable for over an hour plus the message that "2021-02 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 10 Version 20H2 for x64-based Systems (KB4601382)" failed. So it appears the supposedly unecessary Windows Update files cleaned by "Cleanup System Files" WERE NECESSARY after all, and thus Windows Update is now in need of repair.

LESSON: When cleaning up system files, NEVER SELECT "Windows Update Cleanup" unless you want to screw up your machine.

wmcole - from my experience, it seems any update with 'PREVIEW' in description causes problems but of course we have no control of what MS is trying to force on us so totally oblivious until error occurs and the the subsequent running of WAAS. Please Microsoft solve this issue or DO NOT issue these mid term 'PREVIEWS' as, evidently there is an issue with these.

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.

I just checked and there is not one failed update on my laptop going all the way back to September of last year. Today Waas Medic was running and chewing away at my hard drive for half an hour. I finally just chose to "end task". A manual check for updates shows the system is fully up to date or at least no updates are offered. I'm running 20H2 Build 19042.844 and I have not done an update file clean up.

Does anyone know how to report this BUG to Microsoft ? They obviously don't read this forum.

I'm about ready to install a Linux distro and dual boot it with Winblows 10 and just let Windows die. There are a couple of things I still need on the windows side otherwise I'd overwrite it and just install Linux.