Windows Vista USB device connect/disconnect sound re-occurance

I am on a Vista home premium system and have a resource monitor running as a gadget. I keep getting a cpu usage of around 30% off and on and hear the system sound of connection of a usb device every few seconds. I can't seem to nail down the culprit. I am monitoring processes in device mgr. and see windows mediaplayer.exe show up on list and then disappears about the same time frame. The program is not running. Anybody got a clue???

 

Try closing down your bowser and see if the CPU usage goes down to "standard ". I found if I had one particular website open, it could send the CPU usage up to 40 - 50% for just that website. I sent a complaint to their website support. It was a television program listing website and the "catch your eye" advertising was causing the CPU usage. I've found another program listing website

Start from a cold boot. Watch the usage as you open programs and applications. If it runs high from logon (blank taskbar), it will be caused by a background program. It might be something banging it's head against your firewall, it might be malware.

If nothing seems to be causing the "found new hardware ", try going to the computer (motherboard) manufacturer's website and updating the chipset drivers.

Matt
PS Click the heading at the top of the CPU usage column in Task Manager, that will sort the usage by amount. You will probably have to click twice to have the high usage at the top.

 

Thanks for the reply. When I do a cold boot, the cycle still continues. In task mgr, I am getting wmplayer.exe flashing on and off in the process list and the cpu usage varies from 10% to 34%. I went to my startup in msconfig, and it is not a program I start automatically. I went to remove the program and it isn't listed. I use the program some but there is a booger in there somewhere. BTW, I don't download music.

 

You can't uninstall WMP, it is integrated into Windows (don't try to uninstall it you will probably damage Windows).

There is a WMP service. Look in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services, set it to Manual if it is on Automatic.

Open WMP, go to the Tools menu (can you see the menus toolbar?) -> Options, turn off any automatic updating you can find (like setting update CODECs to once a month). If you see a setting you want to keep, change it, reboot, check the CPU usage, then go back and change it to the original setting.

Do the connect/disconnect sounds seem to coincide with the high CPU usage? Look in the Firewall settings, is WMP set to Allow? Try setting it, it might be trying to get it's updates. Do you only have one firewall running? You should only run one, so if you say, have one in your antimalware suite, check that Windows Firewall is disabled.

Just a maybe. Are you subscribed to any "feeds" from websites, maybe they are trying to start WMP. Try thinking along those lines, something is trying to start WMP, but it is not succeeding and it is giving no error message. Maybe a background program is trying to open a file, but the file extension (eg., ".txt ") is set to "Open With..." Windows Media Player. If you ever use Open With, and you are not sure what program to use to open it, watch that the checkbox at the bottom is not checkmarked for "Always use this program to open this type of file ".
http://www.webtlk.com/2008/07/09/ho...am-used-to-open-a-file-extension-association/
Check the listings in Associate a file type or protocol with a program.

Matt

 

I finally found the culprit....it was wmp network scanner whick I didn't even know I had. I stopped the service and it fixed the problem...thanks for all the suggestions...

 

Thanks for letting us know.

If you just stop the service, it will start again when you restart/reboot the computer. You will need to set it to disabled if you don't want it starting again. Apparently, it shouldn't cause problems setting it to disabled, remember though, that some functionality could be lost.

Probably not important to you.

That works around it happening, think about if there is something that could be causing it to happen (the system apparently seems to think there is a player or device to connect to. Mmmm...does it have BlueTooth? Is it trying to connect to a BlueTooth device?)

Matt