I have a program called STISVC.exe running on my Win 2K box all the time in the background, as seen in Task Manager > Processes. It is consuming about 2% of CPU time and doing disk reads and *writes*. I have seen it in the past, but it has never consumed CPU time. Has it morphed into something nasty? It lives in \WinNT\System32. It is part of Windows 2000, and is for detecting static image devices. Maybe JASC Paint Shop Pro invokes it. According to www.AnswersThatWork.com it is "Still Image Service" and "On Windows 2000 and XP most scanners and many digital cameras will not work if you stop this service, as the drivers integrate tightly with STISVC, so leave it alone." I have renamed it, and it almost immediately pops up again under its old name, as though something were recreating the STISVC.exe file. I tried to terminate it with Task manager > Processes > End Process, but it refuses to terminate it! There appear to be no negative side effects, but I am profoundly worried. A brief Google search showed up nothing about any related virus. Norton AV has not picked it up as a virus. Q. How big should this file be? (Mine is 61712/61952 bytes.)

This article might help. http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm

Thanks. It turned out to be a Windows Service, and I stopped it via Control Panel > Admin Tools > Services. We'll see what happens next. I would still like to know why it writes to disk.