Hi, folks! I just joined your forum (thanks for having me) because, you guessed it, for the past few days "ashServ.exe" has been taking 100% cpu usage upon logon.
Prior to this morning the only work around I could find was to disable virus protection, but I have made a discovery that leads me to believe that "ashserv.exe" may not be the culprit.
I am running Windows XP Home SP2 on an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ machine with 1.5GB RAM and 3000MB Pagefile. I am using Windows XP Firewall and have installed avast! v4.6.655 Home Edition Anti-Virus and (thank you once again Bill Gates!) Microsoft Anti-Spyware (Beta-1) v1.0.0.509. I discovered this morning that "ashServ.exe" shifts into high-heat overdrive only when it and the Microsoft real-time security agents ("gcasServ.exe") are enabled at the same time. Since the anti-spyware software has been acting somewhat (understatement) strangely lately, i.e., alerting that the NetBios Messenger Service is running when in fact it is disabled and also stopping the alerter and messenger services at seemingly random instances, I'm beginning to believe that the antispyware software may be the problem.
If any of you can offer me and insight, tips or advice on this pesky little problem I would really appreciate it, and if any of these little tidbits help, I am more than happy to share.
Anyway (and wish me luck on this), right now I'm going to brave the trip into Microsoft Support and see what I can find out there. If I survive the trip I'll check in later.
Thanks, and may the gods of binary code be with you. -- mike s