gcasServ.exe (Giant) hogging 95%+ CPU cycles

Occasional system hang on XP SP2 caused by gcasServ.exe (a Giant module from the Microsoft Beta) taking most of the CPU cycles and only releasing when I manually kill the process. See the picture.

Seems odd but I wonder if the issue is related to (maybe a cause or maybe an effect) of This other recent problem.

 

Well, guess I'll just chalk this up to a beta bug. Had to disable 'real time protection' which made that service go away. From some sniffing around, I think there may be a bug fix for it released soon.

 

Isin't it amazing how the same software can behave so differently ?

My old stand by reason is still the COMBINATION of things. What combination works for me may well kill your system.

I had same high ( 95% ) CPU use shown the other day. Now both gcasServ.exe and gcasDTServ.exe are showing zero ( 0 )

One POSSIBLE problem I found was that I had set somethings on my Wifes' machine to be shared. ( strorage mostly ) and her machine was not on. I turned it on shut off the share and all was then OK.

Could this just be the age old case of " Something not Found " causing problems ?

Because of other similiar problems in the past I quit sharing. No one machine depends on the other for anything.

Also when I re-installed MSAS yesterday I installed it to a drive other than C:. As of right now it is ( as far as I know ) running full tilt ( Icon is in the systray ) and no problems. ( that I am aware of anyway )

I have found over time that some stuff seems to behave better when not installed on the C: drive along with the OS.

Prevously I thought MSAS was slowing the Internet down. As of the last install that is not true. And I am now loading more at boot up than I was early yesterday. WeatherBug for one. And the Internet seems to behave quite well. Even this site with which I had problems yesterday.

This ideas ( thoughts ) may seem wild but they are things I have discovered over time.

WOW !!! the temp here was 49% at 0700. At 10:00 it is now 35% And raining HARD.

BillyBob

 

BillyBob ...
WOW !!! the temp here was 49% at 0700. At 10:00 it is now 35% And raining HARD.

Ahh, to have a Heat wave
My current conditions at 2:00 pm CST ... -1 below, chill factor -17 below.
Tonight -15 to -20 below, chill factor will be nasty at -35 to -45 below. This will continue through the weekend. Our local school is running. A number of schools in Northern and Eastern WI chose to be closed.

 

I see where you could say we are having a heat wave.

I posted my reply at 10:01. At 11:30 it was SNOWING.

I was talking with my Daughter-in-law out around Topeka Kansas this morning and when she said it was only +4 degrees I had to reach for a jacket. She also mentioned having more than an inch of ICE.

The temp here may not be too bad but yesterday and this morning if we could see from one utility pole to the next we were lucky. And then we get a bunch of IDIOTS out there driving with NO LIGHTS ON.

BillyBob

 

I had to smile when I saw this. Last night we were at a high school basketball game. At game time it was -10 F. The forecast was for -17 overnight. I don't know how it came up but my boy asked me if I thought they'd cancel school for tomorrow (today). I couldn't help but laugh (I really mean I really laughed). I told him this is Minnesota and I doubt they're going to cancel school because it's a bit on the cold side. I said a snowstorm is one thing but cold isn't going to get you there. I told him why would they let you out of school when they know each and everyone of you will be out running around on snowmobiles all day in the very weather that was supposedly to cold for school to open. He said, "I see your point Dad ". School started at 8:30 AM this morning. -15 F

 

Consider it a fitting tribute to the Packers losing to the Viqueens.

Help - Staff - I am being hijacked here and since I'm helping the hijack, I can't do anything to stop it. It's horrible, just horrible. Newt

 

LOL Newt! Guess I wasn't helping the situation any. Sometimes these threads do have a way of running off in the wrong direction. I don't have much to add about your problem though. Haven't experienced it here. The program seems to behave well. My only complaint about it is it seems to be a bit heavy on the mem usage. At this time on mine, the two processes that are running (without the main program open) eat up 13484 KB. Not the end of the world but to contrast that, my AV program (Etrust) with three processes running in the background totals totals 3530 KB usage. If I kill the tray icon mem usage drops to 1164 KB for the background scanning stuff. It's nothing cause me to not use the program but it would be nice if the program was a bit lighter in this department.

 

It's happened to me too, but on the extreme, using 100% of my P4 2.66, 512MB RAM and 2GB Page File .

 

Interesting finding. I disabled the realtime protection which made gcasserv.exe go away. After a day or so (and a couple of reboots) I enabled it again and the exe is running as a service but so far is behaving well. No idea if that will continue but this wouldn't be the first XP thing that response well to being toggled off and then back on.

 

I downloaded and installed the beta anti spyware program last night from MS, and didn't run into anything unusual...except...it reinstalled msmsgs.exe, and it was a running process. Now, I killed this thing a long time ago with Start> Run> RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove
and I had to do it again. Grrr...

The MS antisoftware also claimed to have found "My Search" spyware in my IE toolbar and several registry keys. This comp is/was clean, no way was this "My Search" thing present. Before I let it "clean ", I checked. Nothing there that I could see, but the MS program insisted it was present. Hmmm... I allowed it to "clean ", and now it is not finding anything...and I am searching through the comp to see what else was changed or installed. I'll post back if I find something interesting.

Johanna