need help w/ 100% cpu usage in Vista HP 64

[wilbur]

Hello - about a month ago I installed the latest version of Itunes on my Vista HP 64 hard drive.
Shorty after that I noticed that cpu usage was at 100% even when I wasn't doing anything.
Uninstalled Itunes and that seemed to help some, but not much.
Tried to use SysRestore to roll back before Itunes but found out I didn't have it turned on.
Task mngr. tells me that the main culprit is slsvc.exe but I can't find enough info from google to figure out how to fix this.
I am now on a diff. hard drive running XP Pro (dual-boot w/Vista) because Vista is now such a pain because of this problem.
I ran a fairly in depth scan w/ Nod 32 Av but that didn't help either.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[EzyStvy]

Windows errors related to slsvc.exe?

slsvc.exe is a Software Licensing Service from Microsoft Corporation belonging to Microsoft® Windows® Operating System This is used to protect digital products from copyright infringement.

slsvc.exe should not be disabled, required for essential applications to work properly.
http://www.liutilities.com/products/...library/slsvc/

[wilbur]

Thanks for that, but do you have any ideas why this all of a sudden is causing my cpu to run at 100% ?

You should be able to set that process to a "manual" start-up vs automatic. Make sure slsvc.exe is located in C:\Windows\System32, if not, its probably malware.

[wilbur]

Thanks, I'll try that.

[rwest]

It could be an itunes thing, or somehow affiliated or attatcfhed to it. Just uninstalling itunes may not have fully gotten rid if it. Go to my prograns and see if the folder is there. If you see a folder for it then its not fully uninstalled. Many programs like to leave behind a trace even after saying it was uninstalled properly.

Delete the folder and your recycle bin. Then also go to regedit(not sure if thsi is a vista program)and manually search for itunes, delete or remove the values and headings. if the suspected program depends on itunes it won't find itunes in the registry. Once its link is broken ccleaner shoud be able to wipe the culprit outa there. This only works if your problem relates to itunes.

Something else you could try; is to remove the hard drive and connect it to another pc and run your av and protections scans frpm a different source drive than the dive the OS sits on. I saved a badly infected drive that way once.

[wilbur]

Itunes folder was still in myprograms folder so i deleted it. I used an uninstaller program back when I first got rid of it that supposedly deleted most of the registry files at that time.
I also set slsvc.exe to manual.
Cpu usage has dropped to about 50 to 60% now (after a few reboots).
Should be lower than that but it's a good start.
I recently got rid of about 250 gigs of files (movie & music mostly) from this 640 gig hard drive.
So I'm wondering if maybe some of this cpu usage is Vista running a defrag in the background-I think I read somewhere that Vista does this from time to time?
I like your idea of running scans from another drive - didn't realize I could do that.
Since I'm dual-booting this Vista with XP on another drive I guess I could easily run scans from XP.

[wilbur]

cpu usage is now back up to 100% and slsvc.exe is now back to using 91% of cpu.
Anybody got any ideas?
I'm pulling my hair out here!

[EzyStvy]

Stop the service and set it to disable as a test.

[wilbur]

I couldn't find it under the normal services tab so I ran Sysinternals Process explorer and clicked on slsvc.exe and 'suspended' it from there.
I then went back to the normal services tab and disabled the SL UI Notification service.
cpu usage immediately dropped back down to normal (10 to 20%).
If this sounds like I don't quite know what I'm doing, that's exactly right.
Again - any comments would be appreciated.
I also ran a full scan of this drive using anti-malwarebytes from my XP drive.
It found only 2 items that didn't seem to be very significant.

[rwest]

Save your files. Nuke and pave. Works every time.

[wilbur]

But thanks for your reply - gotta feelin' that that's what I'll probably have to do.
I'm going to wait a little while and hope for the best (or until I find out win-update no longer works).