Hi there! First of all, I searched the forum and google to find any help but to no avail. Some google hits described the same phenomen I witness but gave no solution. So here is my problem: I use offline files to sync my personal folders between my notebook and my PC at home. In this regard everything works fine, however I observed that my notebook got unresponsive for a minute or so every 4 minutes. After a long search and trial I tracked the problem down to svchost and CscService. Disabling the service or manually switching to offline mode in Windows explorer helps to prevent the cpu spike but that's a work around, no solution. As soon as I am connected to a LAN (not necessarily the LAN with the file server attached) the problem occurs again. I know that this problem did not start with my usage of offline files. It worked for quite some time without problems, but unfortunatlely I cannot recapitulate when this problem occured for the first time. However after 1 year of extensive use of my Vista laptop I decided that it was time for a clean installation. So I installed Vista 32 ultimate again, used SP1+2, installed the necessary Acer notebook drivers and a few programs (not that many!) and moved my personal files to the server, thereby enabling offline files again. And you guessed it - the problem reoccured! System protocol does not give any indication, neither does the offline files protocol (eventvwr.msc - application and serviceprotocol - Microsoft - Windows - Offlinefiles - operational) Since the problem was nonexistent in the first place I believe another driver / service or a specific windows update has to be responsible. The following none-MS-services are active: AVG-Virus scanner (not the culprit) Gt-detect (part of Option umts-card driver, not the culprit) Servicelayer - Part of nokia connection manager vmware nat vmware dhcp vmware authorization (none of the vmware services are responsible) xaudio service - Part of notebook audio drivers Considering that I have a fresh vista install and only very little none MS software installed so far I have no idea where to look at now? http://img387.imageshack.us/img387/1921/taskmanagercpuspike.jpg ^^ that's how my task manager always looks like. I could set my clock after that... Thanks for your time pille

Hi, Thanks for posting in Microsoft TechNet Forum. First of all, please understand that to solidly troubleshoot high CPU usage/application hang issues, we may need to debug the related process and then identify the root cause. Unfortunately, debugging is beyond what we can do in the forum. Therefore, I would like to suggest that we perform basic troubleshooting here. If the issue cannot be resolved after that, I may still need to suggest that you contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) for further investigation in the future. Thanks for your understanding. To move on, as you mentioned above, I understand that you have performed many research on this issue. To ensure we troubleshoot this issue efficiently, could you please let me know how you identified the root cause is related to svchost and cscservice? Generally, to find out which process takes abnormal CPU source, we would like to open the task manager to see which process uses the abnormal CPU source. You can perform this method to clarify whether your conclusion is right. In task manager, if it is the process of an application that use abnormal CPU source, please note the name of this application and temporally uninstall it to see if the issue persists. Otherwise, if the process is SVCHOST.EXE, it may be related to a service. In this case, you can use the following steps to find out what applications are using most of the CPU: a) Right click the taskbar, and click Task Manager to open. b) In Task Manager, click on the Processes tab, and look for the process that is using abnormal CPU and note its PID (Process ID). Note: You may need to go to the "View" -> "Select Columns" menu and check PID (Process Identifier) first. c) Once you have the PID, please run the following command line from a command prompt: tasklist/svc. d) Please check the output item of the related SVCHOST.EXE process (with the recorded PID), and see if it is related to CscService. You can uninstall these services to see if the issue persists. Meanwhile, I would like to suggest that you reinstall drivers to updated, then perform a clean boot to determine if this issue is caused by a loading program or service. a) Click the Start Button type "msconfig" (without quotation marks) in the Start Search box, and then press Enter. Note: If prompted, please click Continue on the User Account Control (UAC) window. b) Click the "Services" tab, check the "Hide All Microsoft Services" box and click "Disable All" (if it is not gray). c) Click the "Startup" tab, click "Disable All" and click "OK". d) Then, restart the computer. When the "System Configuration Utility" window appears, please check the "Don't show this message or launch the System Configuration Utility when Windows starts" box and click OK. Hope this helps. Thanks.