dwm.exe causes HD runaway

Every thur morning, dwm.exe causes causes excessive harddrive I/O. It slows my machine to where it is not useable and I have to wait 3 to 4 hours before the hard drive stops running and goes back to normal. Task Manager shows no problems - cpu is fine, mem is fine. Task Scheduler shows no tasks activated that are different. Resouce Monitor shows Hard Drive maxed out at 100% with excessive reads and writes. When I kill dwm.exe, the symptoms stop and everything is fine until I reboot and then it kicks in again. If I just let it run for the 3 to 4 hours it completes its activity and is fine for a week. It seems to be reorging the DB. I've turned off all defrag activities, etc and the process still occurs. Any help with this is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

THIS is a good read on this subject.

Roger

 

Appreciate the help

Thanks Roger. Appreciate the help. This link does explain what dwm.exe is and other links do an excellent job of explaining its size and attributes. But so far I haven't found anything that addresses the Win 7 behavior I've described. It is also possible to find this issue reported in Vista, but no resolutions posted for that OS either. Again, thanks, greatly appreciated.

 

Sounds like you may have something scheduled to run
weekly. I would check for virus scans and backups that are
automatically running every week.....

luck,
savagcl

 

savagcl, an excellent suggestion. Its periodic behavior does indicate a scheduled event. I've gone through each area where a windows event can be scheduled and haven't found anything. I expect it's a SQLServer event, but I don't know where those events are maintained. Thanks for the help.