Spoolsv.exe eating 95% CPU

[patkim]

I notice that whenever I double click the drive icon (say C, D E etc) in right pane of Windows explorer, the system kind of hangs or slows down. I find spoolsv.exe eating up almost 95% CPU and thereafter if I don’t kill this process in time the system goes in hang and I am left with no option but to hit the reset button on the front panel!
Exploring the drive works fine from the left pane of windows explorer..the right pane operation hangs as mentioned above.
Any thoughts, suggestions would be great.

It’s XP Pro SP2, AMD Athlon 1.8 Ghz, 512 MB RAM config

Thx

[Disc_Junkie]

Spoolsv.exe is printer spooler service and is a normal system service. It doesn't takes whole lot of CPU usage when it's idle but it takes when you give printing jobs. But spoolvs.exe is a trojan...

As you are saying that the computer becomes slow on double clicking a partition, I think that the root of the partition is infected by autorun.inf which tries to access spoolsv.exe. It may make the Microsoft Image Writer or your printer have printing jobs in queue when double clicked. Therefore check if you have documents in queue in your Printer and Microsoft Image Writer in Printer and Faxes. If there is then delete them. If you find any autorun.inf files in the drives, delete them. Also if you have a firewall block the service. Scan your comp. with an updated antivirus and Trojan Remover.


Check this too: http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2003-112315-1255-99&tabid=2

[sam_52136]

Hey buddy try to put the spooling service to disabled from the services, that might be of some help, but do this if you dont have a printer installed.

Follow these steps:

Go to, run and type "services.msc" without the quotes.
Now search for "Print spooler" or something like that, now right click it and set the "Start-up type" to Disabled.

This tweak will not allow you to use your printer. But incase you wish to use your printer then you have to enable it and start the service manually by the same steps mentioned above.

Hope that works.

You can also visit this link and set some of the services to manual easily to increase your systems performance. -Jammy :-P