services.exe kills cpu on network connect

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I've been having this problem the last 2 days. Every 5 minutes, down to the second, my system freezes for about 30 seconds. I've used process explorer to determine that it's services.exe that is the problem.
My hard drive was formatted less than a week ago, and win2k pro was freshly installed and updated with the rollup service pack 4. I'm running norton av/firewall. Everything ran great the first few days until I installed office 2003. I've tried reinstalling sp4 as I found that there was some kind of problem occassionally with it. I've also reinstalled liveupdate as I've read that there was some problems with that sometimes too.
On a whim, I completely uninstalled both norton and office and removed every reference in the registry that I could find and all folders left behind by them and rebooted. But the problem persisted.
The only thing that seems to stop the utilization spikes is to go to network places and disable my lan connection. But as soon as I reconnect I get the spikes again.
Anyone have any ideas on this?
 
Ok, new info. I found some errors in the system log that coincide with my 5 minute freezes. It seems it's netbt causing the problem. The messege I'm getting is:

"A duplicate name has been detected on the TCP network. The IP address of the machine that sent the message is in the data. Use nbtstat -n in a command window to see which name is in the Conflict state. "

When I check nbtstat it shows:

Local Area Connection:
Node IpAddress: [192.168.0.178] Scope Id: []
NetBIOS Local Name Table
Name Type Status
---------------------------------------------
THUNDERJ <00> UNIQUE Registered
THUNDERJ <20> UNIQUE Registered
HORSE-EGGS <00> GROUP Registered
HORSE-EGGS <1E> GROUP Registered

I'm assuming this means that there is no conflict (and yes .. horse-eggs.. blame my kids .. it's what they named their stuffed lion).

This has given me a broader area to research, but hopefully someone out there can help with that :)
 
SERVICES.EXE Slows CPU - DNS Cache with large HOSTS file

I have just wasted a day getting to the bottom of why my WIN2K SP4 system bogs down every 5 minutes, with Services.exe taking 100% of the CPU. I have traced it to a large HOSTS file (%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\host) which the DNS Cache goes to to refresh itself every 5 minutes. Since microsoft only write fat-ware, it takes an inordinate amount of time to do this.

The hosts file gets quite large (> 180 KB) when you use some of the spyware blocking SW. I "immunized" my system with Spybot recently and it created the large hosts file to block the undesirable websites.

My Windows XP seems to not load the entire HOSTS file into Cache, whereas the WIN2K box does. Type "ipconfig /displaydns" to see what is in your DNS cache. If it is a LONG list, then this may be your problem.

The fix is to disable the DNS caching service but disabling the DNS CLIENT service. See http://www.ericphelps.com/scripting/samples/Hosts/ for some help.

Good luck.
 
Thank You!

That may have been part of the problem. I ended up reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling. Everything ran fine for about 20 mins before it started doing it again. Before I reinstalled I found about 6 wan miniports that had become active on my system. With a little tracing and a lot of digging deeper into the windows os than I really ever wanted to go, I found that they were all trying to create netbios connections to the ics host .. which wasn't running netbios. The result? .. multiple connections being refused multiple times and the jumbled rush of data returning a crap load of duplicate name errors. Why this happened now? I don't know. But turning off those services seemed to fix it. DNS client has also been disabled, but that was disabled before I reformatted also so I think the cause of our problems may have been different though.
 
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