I just read this on the Langalist email :
"Spoolsv" Eats 99% Of CPU Time
Hi Fred, Thank you for maintaining your list. I eagerly read
new issues and have learned amazing things about my PC from you
and your subscribers.
I'm having a problem I hope you can help with. I'm running win
2k on an AMD 2000+ system with 768 meg ram. The spoolsv.exe
program is running at 99% cpu usage, bringing my computer to
its knees. I can turn off spoolsv in the services manager and
my computer runs ok, except that printing is not available. The
last three actions before the reboot that resulted in this
problem were; download a new virus list file from McAfee, run a
Microsoft update, and attempt to create an acrobat file from
Word using Acrobat 6. I have backed out these updates and
uninstalled acrobat to no avail.
Have you or your subscribers encountered this problem and have
a fix? My next step is wipe and reformat which I would like to
avoid. Thanks for your help. ---Bob Newton
A lot of people are having this problem Bob: It appears to be related to
printer services in the beta Service Pack 2 for XP. Alas, it's just one
more example of why you should never try beta software on a PC you depend
on. Beta software has bugs--- that's why it's still beta!
So, if SP2 was the last update you tried, that could explain the whole
problem right there. Also, SP2 isn't uninstallable, so really can't undo
it in the normal way: Instead, you either have to roll the system back to
a pre-SP2 state (eg by restoring a previous drive image); or by a
reformat/reinstall of the original OS. It may be possible--- not likely,
but possible--- to find a workaround by getting new drivers from your
printer manufacturer; or by adjusting the existing drivers to print
directly to the printer, instead of spooling the print job (saving it to
disk) first. You usually can do this in the Control Panel printer applet,
and/or the printer properties dialog. By bypassing the spool services,
you may --- may--- also bypass the Spoolsv problem.
Lots more good info:
http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/w...rum/89990.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=spoolsv%2Eexe+cpu