Hey people, Anybody know if disabling MS Webcheck Monitor causes any problems. I decided to get rid of this piece of MS cr*p after Sisoft Sandra showed it taking up 10MB of process memory. Apparently it has something to do with web subscriptions but its not very well documented by Microsoft and it seems no one knows exactly what it does. It loads from loadwc.exe and uses webcheck.dll as its library. I deleted the dll from DOS and my PC seems to run normally - IE hasn't freaked out yet but I just want to know if anybody here knows anything about this. Jimbo

Have you done a google search for "webcheck monitor". This site appears to have some info about it (although it seems to relate to Windows NT yet the files are also on my W98SE): http://www.iisadministrator.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7654

This is what I found about it with Google: apparently this thing loads at bootup and lingers around even though IE is not necessarily running. I got peeved that this stupid resource sapping process was running all the time with no apparent benefit or use. For anybody interested the following is from www.computergripes.com/IE5.html The mysterious boot time program loadwc.exe October 10, 2000. I try to keep to a minimum the programs that run when my computer boots up. A free program from PC Magazine called Startup Cop shows that under Windows NT4, a program called loadwc.exe is run at boot time. Checking Task Manager just after booting confirms that it is running. What is it? What does it do? This gripe is here because it is part of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately that's all I can figure out about it. My guess is that it has something to do with the IE5 option of automatically checking for new versions of IE (tools -> internet options -> advanced tab). However, on two NT4 machines that I checked, this option was off, and loadwc.exe was nonetheless invoked at boot time. One of these machines was running IE5.01, the other IE5.5. I checked the Microsoft Knowledge Base, found 8 hits on this file and looked at all of them. The only information this turned up was that it was also part of IE version 4. I tried to ask Microsoft this question, but they would not talk to me. The first step of opening a tech support item on the Microsoft web site involves entering the product id. After entering the product id for IE 5.01, the below was their "go away kid don't bother me" response: The Product ID (PID) you have supplied is not entitled to any more support because the No-Charge support period has expired. Undaunted, I went to a computer running IE5.5 and again tried to ask Microsoft this question, supplying the product id for IE5.5. No go. The response was that the product is not eligible for support via online assisted support. Now I am daunted. Perhaps being a monopoly means never having to provide support. Here are some more details about loadwc.exe under NT4: Properties of the file say the vendor is Microsoft Properties of the file say the product name is the Windows 2000 Operating System. This can not be correct, since its running on an NT4 machine. Properties of the file have a description of Load WebCheck It resides in c:\winnt\system32 under Windows NT4 Startup cop identifies it as BrowserWebCheck On the machine running IE5.01 it is dated 11/5/99 and the version is 5.00.2919.6304 On the machine running IE5.5 it is dated 6/6/00 and the version is 5.50.4134.600 Here are the details about this as observed under Windows 98 on a computer with IE5.0: The Windows 98 System Information utility shows nothing related to this in the running tasks section System Information does show a 32 bit webcheck.dll is loaded even though no web browser was run between when I checked and when the system was started. The description of webcheck.dll is "web site monitor" The webcheck.dll resides in c:\windows\system Windows 98 System Configuration utility shows nothing relating to this being invoked at start-up The file loadwc.exe does exist in c:\windows\system and says it is part of the Windows 2000 Operating System. The date of the file is 4/23/99. The Windows 98 research gave me another keyword to search for in the Microsoft Knowledge Base - webcheck. Searching for "webcheck.dll" returned nothing useful. However, searching for "webcheck" returned item Q176960, Description of the Loadwc.exe File in Internet Explorer (last reviewed July 25, 2000). The item says it handles subscriptions and also "propagates settings for user profiles". Oh. November 27, 2000. A reader of this site named Dirk provided some information about webcheck. He said: I believe Microsoft's IIS Resource Kit contains some source code for an 'unsupported' utility called Webcheck. Webcheck is a VB program that checks whether a web site is available or not. I presume that the code for checking a site is contained in the webcheck.dll file and is probably called by loadwc.exe. Why MS has included this in IE is beyond me. I checked the Microsoft Press book "Internet Information Server Resource Kit" which describes v4 of IIS. There is one sentence in the book on page 484 about webcheck. It says: "WebCheck monitors server activity and can send e-mail notification messages or log alerts to a database". Is it the same webcheck? Beats me. December 22, 2000. It seems that you can live without it. Using a utility called Startup Cop from PC Magazine, I stopped loadwc.exe from running at boot time. On two machines so far, everything seems to be working just fine after a few months. Both machines are running NT4 workstation, one has IE5.5, the other IE5.01. January 8, 2001. A reader named Lawrence wrote with another way to prevent it from running at boot time. If you rename "loadwc.exe" to "loadwcNoRun.exe" then Windows will be unable to find the file to run it. There are no error messages returned on startup. If you ever need to return it, just rename it by removing the "NoRun". November 13, 2001. Another reader wrote to say that loadwc.exe is not needed for normal processing under either Windows 95 or Windows 98. He renamed the file to prevent it from running. Lawrence also did much research into this on a system with IE4. His research is below. When you subscribe to a web page, loadwc automatically looks for updates. Clicking on "Update Subscriptions", with loadwc running, it clearly establishes a connection to the web servers in your list and checks for content changes against pages which it has cached. However, what it does in the background, when you're not updating your subscriptions, is unclear. I've watched the traffic between a Windows box and the Internet using a connection through a Linux router, and I've never seen it attempt to mysteriously pass data across. When loadwc is stopped, aside from subscriptions not working, I have not seen any difference at all in the machine - except for the fact that the CPU cycles and memory consumed by this executable have now been freed up. So, do we really need to have a little task running all the time that seems to only be capable of organizing subscriptions when the browser is loaded? If so, why not make it a part of the browser that only starts up then? ... I made a script that launches loadwc and then IE. I used the script to start IE, rather than just clicking on the desktop icon. For two weeks I did this, ensuring that every time I closed Internet Exploiter, I manually intervened and killed off loadwc afterwards. The fact that the browser - including all subscription features - worked fine suggests to me that Microsoft could have made this a part of IE that only runs when IE is loaded. Since M$ didn't do that, there's apparently something else going on; however, I am at a loss to say what. ... Finally, the name, "loadwc", is, from my understanding, an abbreviation of "LOAD Web Check". Therefore, a program given the name "LOADWC" would start up, launch the Web Check application that it's supposed to call, and then terminate. However, I've never seen anything that looks like it might be related to, or launched by, loadwc, in my running 16 or 32 bit task lists. Nor have I ever seen loadwc terminate... Many thanks to Lawrence. In summary, loadwc is not needed.

jimbojones Thanks for the heads-up on this! I renamed my loadwc.exe file to loadwc.bak, and now on restart the nasty program no longer shows as a running task in msinfo32. Browsing has become much faster, and I'm no longer getting those annoying IE shutdown screens. YIPPEEE! I also found another useless background program called wmiexe.exe (see a writeup here: http://www.bits.bris.ac.uk/mxcl/tweaks/wmiexe.php) which I also renamed as .bak. I can't believe the difference in browsing speed eliminating these things has produced. (Funny that neither of these tasks are listed in the msconfig startup list). Thanks again.

OOPS. Forgot to mention that you have to rename the wmiexe.exe file from DOS. It's located in c:\windows\system.

I had a go at Loadwc.exe and Wmiexe.exe too. Loadwc.exe is apparently for updating subscriptions and propogating user profile settings. See: MS Q176960 There is a registry reference: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\CLASSES\CLSID\{1BE1F766-5536-11D1-B726-00C04FB926AF}\LocalServer32] @="Loadwc.exe /L" I removed this file from Windows and noticed no obvious effect. Wmiexe.exe is for remote computer access (networking). There is a good description on: Online Security (about two thirds of the way down). There appears to be no registry entry for this file. I removed this file from DOS too (I have no networking) and noted that it cleared an hour glass delay after the desktop booted which I had never understood. My browsing "seemed" faster but it is too early to judge.

....ooops, goofed my Online Security link: Online Security