WHY after killing serv, does websrv kick in to 100%? your going to tell me that it was scanning a file on my system, and then once dead turned over to another exe to continue? Someone should explain this behaviour to me so I can understand it better.
I have no idea. Killing ashServ.exe, however, is certainly not a correct method, so I don't really find it relevant. If you stopped Standard Shield provider from the user interface, for example (which should reduce the CPU usage, I guess) and ashWebSv.exe starts eating CPU - then it would be something worth investigating.
Agreed, so I decided after a fresh reboot on one system to see what happens, the entire boot phase is 5x longer than normal. For the record a normal boot on this machine is a little over 2 minutes, today it was closer to 10.
Upon looking at task manager, I can see ashserv.exe is hogging all cpu. Attempts to reduce it's priority resulted in an 'access denied'. Pausing or terminating the various sheilds with the Avast GUI did nothing to reduce the load.
I watched it scan 1000 files during the boot phase (according to the counter in the GUI), simply doing what I have deemed normal behaviour. Still nothing to determine why the load is so high.
I did find something worth mentioning. At this time TeaTimer was very active and may very well be interferring or conflicting.
I went into services and stopped ashserv.exe, TeaTimer went to full load for about 10 seconds then load resumed normal idle.
Restarting ashserv.exe from services resumed protections but without the heavy load.
So, OBVIOUSLY some update has changed vast characteristics about how this process starts and the interference level of said startup.
I would like to hear a concrete answer to this issue, and verification of the changes to the program.
J.