Is Your Xlobby Slowing Down?

[BaddaBing]

I am so f***ing pissed right now I can't see straight

I have multiple independent copies of XL around the house and I swear they are all running like shit lately. Slower starting up, slower navigating through categories, slower loading screens and instability that never existed before.

The common thread these machines have is that they all run XP, are all set to auto-update and are all on the same network. Either one of Microsoft's latest patches has introduced a major performance hit to XL - OR - somehow a rootkit got past my firewalls/antivirus because I've run just about every virus/spyware/adware/registry tool I can lay my hands on and they don't report anything.

Please, I'm looking for info not anti-MS rants. This either is happening to you too which means I just need to uninstall the last couple of M$ updates. Or if no one else who is running live update is seeing it then I need to reformat all my machines.

thanks,
baddabing

PS
If it turns out to be a rootkit I'm putting the machine my kids use behind a dedicated firewall

[samgreco]

Sorry to hear of your troubles. Pain in the arse.

Do you know where the rootkit came from? Just like to know these things.

[brainsurgeon]

baddabing,

1. Where is all your content at, maybe something on this machine is slowing down mapped drives, etc. to the others causing performace hits to the machines.

2. Is one machine storing content for all of the others, mapped, shared drives etc..

3. Is your machines setup for the network static or dynamic configuration.

4. Has the router or switch, modem lost power rescently. Maybe one or more of them needs resetting.

5. Looking at your systems resources, does cpu, memory usage look normal.

6. Have you looked at your startup in msconfig maybe something was installed or added to each one of your systems there, causing performance issues.

Based on your profile on the board, I assume you have thought of most of these thing's on your own, but sometimes the obvious gets forgotten.

As of today, both of my systems seem to be working fine.

Just a few quick suggestions.



Wes

[BaddaBing]

Hey there BrainSurgeon,
Thanks for the suggestions. Right after I posted it occured to me that as XL was the only app affected that it had to be something they were all sharing, like the media server.

Funny, I was in the middle running some utils and maintenance on the media server and thought I would check the forum while they ran and there were your suggestions.

Great minds think alike

All kidding aside - thanks for the response.

[Jay]

BaddaBing.
I'm experiencing the same thing here. 100% CPU usage and XL is causing it. Exactly what did you find on your server to fix this?
TIA

[sdumas]

Baddabing,

If you are wondering about rootkits, try this free utility: It called the Rootkit Detective from McAfee.

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/rkstinger.aspx

This should identify if you have a possible rogue rootkit running on your systems.

Here is the description from the website

Following are the features of this program that are designed to proactively detect and clean rootkits from the system. This program is not dependent on any signatures and can proactively detect most of the existing and upcoming rootkits and allow the user to clean them.


Designed to proactively detect the system objects like processes, files and registry that are hidden to the user.
Provides information about all running processes in the system.
Provides information about various system hooks like SSDT(System Service Descriptor Table) hooks, user/kernel IAT/EAT(Import/Export Address Table) hooks.
Allows the user to clean/remove the malicious objects from the system by renaming/deleting the hidden files/registry.
Allows the user to terminate the malicious processes.
Users can submit samples using the submission feature present in the tool.
Users can also collect the samples manually after renaming them and submit to mailto:stinger@avertlabs.com for further analysis.

As far as your kids are concerned, you should try this free tool (also from McAfee) called SiteAdvisor. It will indicate if visited sites contain possible "crap" (too many emails, spyware, adware, etc) BEFORE they get there. A red X means don't go, a green checkmark means it's safe and does not contains malware. It will NOT protect against your kids visiting porn site, just if they contain some type of malware. Again, it's free.

It's not intrusive, it does not install another toolbar. You will get the first time you use it an annoying "would you like to upgrade to the $$$ version", once you said no, it won't bother you again.

http://sadownload.mcafee.com/products/sa/ie/sasetup.exe

Hope this helps.

[BaddaBing]

Figured out the culprit. It wasn't a virus and it wasn't a root kit. And while it wasn't an MS update it was an MS product - Windows Live OneCare. Turns out a process called WINSS.EXE wasn't happy with some of the files the previous (McAfee) antivirus package had left behind. Even without XL running I was at 99% CPU utilization. Once I killed the WINSS.EXE process, ran CCLEANER (a free registry cleaner) and rebooted the system settled back down to less than 10% CPU utilization with XL running. If you Google WINSS.EXE and PERFORMANCE you will find quite a bit of information regarding this issue. Hopefully this will save someone the hours and frustration I went through trying resolve this.

Thanks to everyone that offered advice - appreciate the help.

[samgreco]

Thank you! I was about to try OneCare.

Glad you figured it out.