Hi,

A technical post for a change… For a while now I have noticed that my Vista laptop has been running with a svchost.exe process at anything from 50% to 100% CPU busy time. I tracked it down to the plug and play and DCOM svchost.exe process. Using Google to investigate this issue revealed that a number of people had the same problem – busy CPU bound svchost.exe processes.

Common causes seem to be bad sound card drivers or VMware’s workstation product’s vNetwork services.  I tried various things to resolve my problem; none of which worked.

Last night I managed to resolve my problem of a busy svchost.exe process. Turns out to be caused by the Garmin Ant Agent needed for my Garmin 405! Quiting the Ant Agent immediately drops the svchost.exe process back to normal and starting it causes the svchost.exe process CPU utilisation to jump skyward. This only happens with the Ant Agent USB device removed. With the USB device inserted the computer appears to be OK. I guess the root cause is the Ant Agent being over zealous with it’s polling to see if the USB device has been inserted.

So for now I will not have the Ant Agent running unless I need it to download a workout from my Garmin 405.