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HelpSvc.exe has gone insane!!

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Ok, for the past two weeks I've come back to my computer only to notice that HelpSvc.exe is taking up 100% of one CPU and System is taking up about 60% of another.  I'm not the only one who had this happen to him.  Kevin has the same problem but he got around it by disabling the help service.  I don't want o be so drastic (yet).  Does anyone know why this is happening??

Edit: there's a Knowledge Base Article about this

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004
    I've had this problem on my Win2003 machine. As far as I can tell, it's a bug that first appeared in the W2K3 SP1 builds and I suspect that recent security hotfixes introduced it into RTM as well.

    Disabling HelpSvc is the only solution I know of.

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004


    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;839017

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2004
    Thanks Pavel/Raj!

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2004
    The same happens to one of my Win2003 machines; I've seen it using upwards of 1GB of RAM (!) at times...

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2004
    you can also turn your help service off.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2004
    whoa: I don't want to turn it off :-)

    Help is a good thing. Insane help is not.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2004
    whoa: I don't want to turn it off :-)

    Help is a good thing. Insane help is not.

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2004
    It happened to my XP/Home too, so it's not w2k3 specific.

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2004
    I happens on XP Professional as well. What the heck is this help service doing anyway??

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2004
    An E Linux: Very funny. That gave me quite a laugh ;-)

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 16, 2004
    I have had a problems lately with windows freezing. When I am home in mid browsing/listening/whatever, the screen freezes and everything becomes unresponsive. When i leave the computer on and go to work, I come home to a blank monitor, again unresponsive. Starting up often nothing happens, or it freezes on startup. After one particularly slow startup I opened task manager to find wmiprvse.exe and helpsvc.exe winding down and closing. Any thoughts on this?

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2004
    should I just delete the helpsvc.exe file? Is that a dumb move?

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2005
    Yes, that IS a dumb move. You can get to your Services by opening Control Panel (Can access from Windows Explorer) and opening "Administrative Tools" --> there is a Services icon in there where you can find and disable "Help and Support" (Helpsvc.exe)

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2005
    Have the same issue on XP SP 2 IT-pro. So I guess it doesn't discriminate. Came home today and found my HD light blinking. Checked it out and found "helpsvc.exe" (lowercaps) -SYSTEM- had eaten 30 mb of RAM and was doing 70% cpu.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2005
    unplugged network cable hard drive light stopped blinking helpsvc went to 100% cpu.....was this program sending data to msoft?

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 22, 2005
    My cat's breath smells like cat food.

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2005
    Thanks so much for the fix

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2005
    I Just had this problem on XP PRO SP2. My comp didint freeze or lock up and it was stable (as its a pretty fast machine) but this system process was using 100% CPU and 304mb ram.

    Searched the process name on google and see that everone else has this problem.

    Anyway, I have windows help as it takes ages to load up when you click it and its pretty unresponsive.

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2005
    hello my sound has gone on the computer i have gone to sound controll pannel i have set everything but nothing has happenedcould you help with it or give me a website to go to , to help me
    your fathfully
    deanjwoodward

  • Anonymous
    October 05, 2005
    There is a simple solution that seems to work (only been running it a couple of days) at the following site:
    http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist_h.htm

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2005
    Well you can't delete this HelpSVC.exe. I tried that six times. It kept regenerating itself as if by magic.

    And you can't rename it either as I tried that a few times. It does the same thing as if you deleted it. Just regenerates itself with the proper name.

    The best tip was above for just turning the help service off. I still don't know if that will fix the problem of this taking all my CPU at random times but I am pretty certain that it will.

    Heidi

  • Anonymous
    December 17, 2005
    I think I've found a easier solution.
    Set startuptype for the service (Help and Support) to Manual, not Automatic.

    I'm not 100% sure if this fixed the problem, but I have used my PC for 6 hours now, made two restarts and it seems to that the service stopped starting without beeing asked for it.

  • Anonymous
    December 25, 2005
    For Heidi, and anyone else, the helpsvc.exe is just one of many files in 200 and after that are protected by the system...
    See microsoft knowledgebase article http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/system_file_protection.mspx for info.

  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2006
    I got this problem after I tried windows updates. The windows updates crashed for some reason when I tried to install them. After that I noticed my cpu was at 100% most of the time.
    A quick fix is to run msconfig and uncheck the help and services under the services tab, then apply and reboot.
    I don't use help and services, so this solved my problem.
    Good Luck.

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 18, 2006
    I've just started to have this problem with helpsvc.exe AFTER installing the latest hotfixes for XP Professional SP1!!!

    I wrote a quick and dirty program to tell me when helpsvc.exe started and everytime I had the problem helpsvc.exe was running straight after I had logged on after a reboot - so something during boot startup was causing it to run.

    I think I've managed to fix it by setting the Help and Support Services to Manual start and following the instructions at http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist_h.htm

    However, I'm wondering if the problem is fire-wall related as MS article 555179 talks about having to manually configure XP SP2 firewall for Help to work.

    I'm using Norton Personnel Firewall 2006 with SP1 and under a restricted XP account this firewall blocks any attempt to access the internet by any program it doesn't know about. If helpsvc.exe is trying to access the Internet and is being blocked, does it keep trying repeatedly - using more and more resources because of bad programming - until it succeeds or is killed?

    Does anyone have any thoughts/knowledge on this???

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2006
    I'm using Norton 2006 and have not had the issue.  helpsvc.exe has run before, but ends quickly without consuming much CPU.  

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2008
    PingBack from http://deandre.clearviewtickets.info/helpsvcexe.html

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2008
    PingBack from http://desiree.beststoriesxxx.com/helpsvcexe.html

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.keyongtech.com/3924625-helpsvc-exe