avast Home CPU hog?!?!

[dbatch]

There is a strange problem with my avast Home.
Everything was working fine for 4 mounts, but now it looks like every 33 seconds ashServ.exe eats a lot of CPU time for couple of seconds and I can see the ball in the taskbar spinning.
I don't know if it is avast or there is another program attempting to do something and avast is just scanning it. Is there anyway to tell?
I have Win XP pro and I don't see anything suspicious in the startup scripts of the other programs, I have Microsoft antispyware beta as well.
Thank you.

[Eddy]

Enable "show detailed info" in the provider and see what it is scanning.
It may tell us a lot more.

[dbatch]

I have used Sysinternals filemonitor
and I did filter for ashServ.exe,
fo some reason avast was scannig

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Antispyware\error.log

The file was over 3Megabytes which is a lot fora txt file.

I have cleared the contents and now it is fine.

Thanks for the help

[dbatch]

I did enable the "show detailed info" on the provider. It is scanning that Microsoft Antispware Beta errors.log file every 30 or so seconds, but the smaller size is not hammering the CPU anymore.

[whitesnake_pg]

I was having the same problem. Having seen this thread, I've added the Microsoft Antispyware Errors.txt to the Ignore List under the Standard Shield > Customise > Advanced section of the resident protection.
This has solved the problem for me.

[Lisandro]

There are 2 exclusions lists:
On-access:
Left click a blue icon > Standard Shield provider settings > Customize > Advanced > Add it to the exclusion list.
On-demand:
Right click a blue icon > Program settings > Exclusions (tab)

[igor]

Well, the Standard Shield exclusion list is certainly the only relevant here (no need to exclude it from on-demand scanner).

[Lisandro]

Well, the Standard Shield exclusion list is certainly the only relevant here (no need to exclude it from on-demand scanner).

Sorry, Igor, you're fully right 

[yahpete2003]

Hi Igor, my avast is apparently goobling up a lot of my computers resouces. I have disabled instant messenger scanner, and P2P scanner but its still a problem. When I check my windows task manager, I get duplicates of svchost.exe SYSTEM and svchost.exe NETWORK SERVICE. I have run various scans for spyware etc and have no problem in that regard but when I run a program to see what programs are running at any given time, Avast is shown to be taking up far more resouces than any other single program.

Pete

[Lisandro]

I get duplicates of svchost.exe SYSTEM and svchost.exe NETWORK SERVICE.

Why are you thinking this is avast! related?
avast! does not run any svchost.exe process. They belong to Windows (or, in the worst case, they're from infected files, spywares, trojans etc.).

Avast is shown to be taking up far more resouces than any other single program.

It's not a problem... or, better, maybe it was.
avast! need resources to scan the programs you're running. If you disable avast! you'll be unprotected but you'll get all resources you want.

[DavidR]

As Tech said svchost is a common interface and used by many programs (and in this case avast doesn't use it), I have 4 occurances of svchost running 3 for system and one network services.

ashServ.exe activity (and the icon spinning) only happen when a file/s is scanned, you need to identify what is accessing files, causing them to be scanned.

[Abraxas]

I've seen a lot of people worried about the multiple entries of svchost running on there system lately.
As David said:

I have 4 occurances of svchost running 3 for system and one network services.

I checked this filename out for a friend a while ago.
There is a Virus ; which manifests itself as SCVHOST. The multiple instances of svchost running seems to worry people. Only if it's spelt SCVHOST is there anything to worry about.
Personally if I'm concerned about avast's activity I simply Left click the 'a' in the tray>and click on the Standard shield icon to view what's being scanned.