anyone know what this is?

[devohoneybee]

My laptop (IBM Thinkpad) works fine except when it doesn't. Periodically it gets so slowed down with something running in the background that it pretty much forces me to reboot. It also doesn't want to shut down, and when that happens, I end up just hitting the power button until it goes night night. Task manager lists "rundll32.exe" as the CPU hog. A quick google search throws up a bunch of articles claiming BOTH that this program is necessary for Windows operation, and that it is a worm (sometimes). My AV, spyware, and adaware programs aren't finding anything suspicious (yes they are all updated). There are ads in the google margins for removing rundll32.exe, but how am I supposed to figure out if I have the good one or the bad one? If it's the proper one, I shouldn't remove it. Then again, if it's the proper one, why is it hogging my CPU's like that? Any sane advice appreciated. Thanks! (Oh and avgw.exe -- another CPU hog, though it's only taking up 65%, unline the 99% consumption of the rundll32.)

Edited to add: Nebbermind on the avgw -- it's my anti-virus program. Ooops. *g*

Comments

[elflet.livejournal.com]

Rundll32.exe is a normal part of Windows. Most of Windows (and most of all Windows applications) live in "Dynamically Linked Libraries", known as DLLs. If Microsoft's engineers ever needs to fix bugs in Windows, they can do so by shipping one or more new DLLs. Run-DLL is the tool that Windows uses to execute these.

So, what's happening is your antivirus program is using one or more DLLs, probably one of the Microsoft libraries, and then doing a lot of processing on its own. So Rundll32.exe comes up looking like a CPU hog (as the DLL is doing a lot of work reading files), and then yourt antivirus looks like another one as it analyzes the data coming back through the DLL.