From: "Geo." 

try opening printers window when the spooler hogs again and see if any
printers show a print job.

Geo.

"Jeff Shultz"  wrote in message
news:3fb44df4{at}w3.nls.net...
> I did some updating today at work - Microsoft Office updating. I went to
the
> Office Update and started downloading what they told me to - it ended up
> being Office 2k SP-something for Disk 2 and Office XP SP1 & SP2 +
hotfixes.
>
> And then the weirdness started... after a little while I noticed my
computer
> was acting sluggish, very sluggish. And there was this tiny window down in
> the lower right hand corner of my screen, barely big enough to contain the
> "X" close button that it had in it. I think there might have
been an "M"
as
> the first letter on the title bar behind it. I could sorta select it, I
> couldn't move it, make it larger, restore it or close it. It just sat
> there. And the machine was still sluggish.
>
> Okay, C-A-D and pull up Task Manager... after a couple of tries it
actually
> came up (whoa, something is really hogging the cycles!). Nothing weird in
> the Programs tab - everything there I expected to be there. Go over the
> Processes tab... okay, why is spoolsv.exe taking up 95-99% of the CPU?
> Couldn't kill it, couldn't touch it... it resembled the little box in a
lot
> of ways. Finally got a shutdown to start taking... but had to hit the
> button to finally shut it off and restart it.
>
> After it reboots everything is fine and dandy for awhile... and then in
the
> middle of a customer call I notice it's acting sluggish again... and the
> little box is back... and spoolsv.exe has taken over the CPU again. Run
> Adware - nothing. Try to run Norton AV (corp ed.) and it takes 6 minutes
to
> get through two files before I kill it. Pull the network cable from the
> wall. Time to try to reboot again... kill everything off, hoping that one
> of the running programs is causing the print spool (for that is what
> spoolsv.exe is) to go nuts (I hadn't printed nor tried to print anything
> btw). No luck. Right before everything goes blue (not the BSOD, just the
> blank background) Win2k (SP4 if I haven'b mentioned it) admits that it's
> closing something called "Messagebouncer". Hmmm. Have to use the power
> switch again.
>
> Boot up, start hunting for Messagebouncer - ends up it's in a Real One
.dll
> - goodbye Real. Go in and turn of a bunch of services (something I
probably
> should have done awhile ago). spoolsv.exe just sits there at 0%. Go
looking
> through the registry..... no real luck. Run Norton... this time it at
least
> runs, and was still running when I left. spoolsv.exe was still just
sitting
> there at 0%.
>
> Any ideas what the heck happened? And how to stop it from happening again?
> Other than not attempting Office Update that is......
> BTW, spoolsv.exe is 45k in size and I think the date was 6/19/2003. It was
> sitting in both the system32 and the servicepack/i386 folders.
>
> --
> Jeff Shultz

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