WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

An interesting additional stirrer to this mess: prefetch.

WaasMedic or not, prefetch is a complete nuisance. I switch it off by giving all related registry keys value 0 (several instances) - and some updates switch it on again. Also I delete everything from the Prefetch directory.

MarcHoppe:

Thanks for your post.

I was wondering how you determined which files were accessed by a process. I see you used MS resource monitor... disk activity and filtered on the waasmedic agent process. I will use that in future.

Interesting the difference in files read by waasmedic on SSD system from those on HDD system. In the past have your SSD system(s) experienced performance degradation from waasmedic, or have you seen the problem only on HDD system(s)?

Happy WaaS Day everybody. Here is my report for 06-13-21. I finally managed to catch WaaS running on the system that has an SSD. It only lasted for about 30 seconds or so. It did not read all the files in the WinSxS or LCU folders even though all those files are present. However on another system with an HDD WaaS ran for over 8 minutes reading those files in WinSxS and the "Package for Rollup Fix" folders. On one system where I did the registry hack to disable WaaS it did not run and in the Task Scheduler gave the message "this service could not be started because it is disabled" so that reg hack appears to work. However on another system where I had done the reg hack a Windows update turned WaaS back on. So the reg hack is something that will have to be done again after every update. It only takes a few seconds to apply so no big deal. *Disclaimer* I am not advising anyone to do the reg hack as I have no idea what long term affect it will have on a system. If it causes Windows to stop working on the systems I have applied the hack I'll simply and gladly replace Winbloat 10 with a Linux distro and watch them perform 100% better. The image below shows what was scanned on the system with a SSD and again it only ran for about 30 seconds. So either this WaaS issue is something that only affects systems with HDDs or M$ is deliberately causing the system degradation from WaaS either for nefarious reasons or out of plain incompetence.

No, WaaSMedic has been around since long before SSDs were common. It's the later versions of Windows that are designed to take advantage of SSDs. But on this system which has an SSD drive the weekly WasSMedic run is over so quickly I can't even catch it in the Task Manger. There is no way an SSD drive no matter how fast can scan all the files in the Package for Rollup Fix sub-folders in the LCU folder and all the files in the WinSxS folder in that short of a time. We're talking hundreds of thousands of files and about 12 gigs of data. No way WaaS is scanning all that so fast it can't even be seen in the Task Manager or Resource Monitor. So it appears the WaaS BUG only affects HDDs. Of course the price of SSDs has come down but how many people would know how to install an SSD and migrate their Windows install and data over to the new drive? If I were to migrate the data on my studio computer to an SSD I would then have to reauthorize a lot of plugins since their copy protection is based on machine ID. It's not a trivial task or I would have already done it. But to expect people to spend any money at all to solve this BUG that M$ introduced sometime earlier this year is totally unreasonable. Pay attention to what this guys says near the end of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3kYlLbk20I