Friends I am posting this in Security since lsass.exe deals with services for authentication and my suspicion is that this issue is not about lsass.exe itself but some dependency perhaps peculiar to Lenovo. The hardware is a Thinkpad T61 with oem-image of Windows Vista Home Premium. Its been scrubbed, no malware, and tuned well and performs adequately for Vista. The one remaining bug is the one in my Title. I have turned off every authentication-device related service I can find, yet lsass.exe continues to churn away all the time, nonstop, whenever the system is on. by the end of a typical workday it will accumulate in excess of 100,000 I/O Reads/Writes. I have searched exhaustively for answers and despite many threads on the same issue, I have seen no valid answers. In most cases the subject/post is abandoned. I posted this issue on Social/Microsoft-Answers and a respondent suggested I post it here. So what could possibly be triggering lsass.exe to perform simultaneously 3 I/O reads and 3 I/O writes per second? How to remedy? I note that this particular model thinkpad did come from the source with numerous security/authentication features. And to repeat myself, all of the services related thereto that I can identify are turned OFF at this point. I note in passing that neither CPU usage nor Memory allocation for lsass.exe is excessive or abnormal. I also note in passing that on my own personal thinkpad running Win7, lsass.exe is dormant once I'm logged in. The I/O count is trivial. thanks for any direction you can provide.

I have the same issue with very slow computer (XP SP3) and most I/O writes going to lsass.exe. I performed the above comparison and it does not appear that taskmgr is responsible for them.

So a quick sanity check. Can you confirm a) what the "Status" and "Startup type" values are for the "Terminal Services" service (accessed via Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services) b) what is the value of the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\CDRom\Autorun" David