Hi. I hope someone can help me with this, because it is annoying.

I was using Windows 2000 SP3 for a while and everything was fine. One day after not installing anything new recently Windosw stalled for 5 minutes on the Propogating Network Components dialouge while Windows was still stating up (I'm referning to the box that comes up with the looping fading blue line in it).

After the stall, everything is fine until I want to connect to the Internet. My ISP uses no software other than the DUN that is included with Windows. It dials up, but when it gets to verifying username and password, the computer stalls for 5 minutes again.

Upon looking in the Task manager, I see that services.exe is taking up all the space everything else is not taking (ex. if everything else combined takes up 20% of the cpu usage then services.exe will take up 80%, 15%/85%, 17%/83% etc.) It does this all the time now. Turn on the computer - stall. Log on the 'net - stall. Log off and log back in later - stall. It is always for about 5 minutes, and then everything is normal again. I have AVG Free and Zone Alarm on my computer, and I keep them updated. I even installed SP4, but that didn't solve the problem either.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

it still sounds like the blaster worm. this is exactly the kind of behavour it gives.

at least thats my guess.

Check to see if you have installed Windows Update 329170. If so, uninstall it. I had the same problem of very slow startup you describe and this solved it.

This is a known bug in services.exe, acknowledged in microsoft kbase. Since sp2 they say the service packs will fix it, but sp4 can't fix it, yet.
I had it two or three times. I read about anything I could about win2k services and stuff. Disabled some, but no good. The only thing that solved was to reinstall a fresh copy of win2k.
It seems that after some time of use, win2k triggers this behaviour. Don't know exactly why.
Try searching "sevices.exe cpu time" in this forum.
Very annoying.

Thanks for the responses. I'd be a fool to have MSBlast after dealing with all of the customers that *still* call up about it at work. Some have the nerve to say it is our fault! =( Zone Alarm stopped MSBlast even before I installed a new antivirus program or the patch from Microsoft.

I am low on hard drive space, so I didn't download the uninstall files for the patches, so System Information shows that there is nothing I can uninstall as far as 329170 goes.

The dreaded format... If I stopped being so cheap and bought a CD-RW drive or another hard drive, I'd have formatted my computer a long time ago.

It is more of a hassle than anything else. I don't have other problems besides this, but it happens every time I use my computer.

Once again, thanks for the trouble.