Hello all, My pc was up for 8 days, when i had to reboot. (Win2k Adv Server has been installed over a year) After the reboot, the box came up, and now, services.exe uses 100% cpu 100% of the time. it never dies, and i cannot kill it with Tskill or the task manager. Here are a few things that i have found, When i go to the services menu, it opens and gives an error that it cannot open up becuase the RCP Server is too busy. Also, i have changed all the EVT log files names so when i rebooted they rebuilt themselves, (didnt work) I have tried to fix it from the repair console, with no luck. Frankly, i am out of ideas, please help. I am going to try the restore from the install cd tonight, but i would like to fix it without going this route, as the pc is slow as molasses because of the cpu usage. I had not installed anything new before the reboot. and i had not touched the registry before the reboot. 733mhz P3 Smart&Friendly CD-RW Generic Floppy drive Abit bx133 Raid MotherBoard 2 Maxtor HD's Generic Video Card Never had a problem before. Please help if you can.

Short of something wrong with Windows (what isn't?) I would say your Processor is pegged. I dunno why, but maybe heat or maybe it is just faulty. If the re-install doesn't fix it, then this is most likely the reason other than that I have no idea, sorry I cannot help any more than that. (not a dig or anything but this is the reason I use linux also.)

I use linux also, dang near as much as i use Windows, but i find it very hard to believe this is a processor issue, because: today, at lunch, i was playing with it again, and services.exe "died with a signal of 0" and everything worked speedy and nice, for the 60 seconds that the O.S. gave me before it shut down (got a neet error box that even counted down for me, like new years all over again) for this reason i dont think its a processor issue, although i do agree, that my "processor is pegged" BECUASE OF SERVICES.EXE!

well, odd but working, here is what i did. i went into the command prompt, and ran "runas /user:administrator cmd" and it immediately terminated services.exe with a status code of 128, as soon as i entered the admin password. (i didnt terminate it, i just logged in) then it gave me the neat box with the countdown to terminal failure, and rebooted just fine. dont ask me how, but it is working at the moment, but i do have a feeling this wont be the last time i have a bout with services.exe. if anyone has any ideas on what the problem was/is, please make a post.

*sniff* it didnt work, after another reboot, its broke again.

I too fell victim to services.exe consuming 98% to 100% of the CPU. I was successful in hunting down the root cause to fix the problem. I hope this note is of value to those who get nailed with this services.exe inconvenience. A quick summary: I run Win2000Pro on an Intel clone. A reboot after several weeks uptime went awry when SERVICES.exe ate 98%++ of the CPU without letup. In my case, the EVENT LOG service was not successfully starting up because the three (App, Security, System) event logs were corrupt. Fixing (replaced them with logs from a known-to-be-good system) the event logs allowed the EVENT LOG service to start correctly, thus no longer causing SERVICES.exe to choke and eat 98% to 100% of the CPU. First, note that SERVICES.exe is (like) an umbrella (parent) service for many other (child) services. The key troubleshooting step that helped me was to go into the services management console and 'disable' the EVENTLOG service, which that are runs out of SERVICES.exe. So, in general, search for one or more failing 'child' services of SERVICES.exe. Setting a suspect child service to 'disabled' and rebooting was my ticket to success. Make note of what changes you make to services settings so you can undo them later. I did re-apply SP2 early on, without success. I did not delete the corrupt *.evt logs and allow the Event Log service to build new ones (which should have worked fine). Rather, I overwrote the corrupt logs with logs from a sister system. The EventLog service now starts up like a charm, services.exe no longer attempts to set new thermal threshold records with my overclocked cel300 (clone, verrry old clone), and the system now runts like a charm. ;->

I was glad to find this thread. I run WIN2K Pro, P4 1.4, and last night, after a normal shutdown and reboot, the same thing, 98% pegging. I login under a user account for myself, so I tried logging in under the administrator and bingo, everything was OK. I then created a new login account and everything is fine so it is certainly user dependent. I have three existing accounts before the 98%, 1 admin and 2 users. Both users have admin privledges but both had the 98% problem. New users created post 98% do not have the problem. I will use the points mentioned here to try and correct my problem. Hope it works, I will be back to let you know how it goes, Thanks in advance for taking the time to help.