This past month virtually all my clients Windows XP machines and Server 2003 servers have been afflicted with this issue that seems very similar to the one detailed here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/asiasupp/archive/2007/05/29/automatic-update-causes-svchost-exe-high-cpu.aspx
Since just about everyone has this issue all at once I am inclined to think that an update or a change to the update site is causing the issue.
However this blog is from 2007 so none of the fixed listed do any good (because all my machines are already up to date)
The only way I have found to safely bring the CPU usage back down to normal is to disable and kill the Automatic update service, however on most machines this seems to re-enable itself on reboot and of course this means I cannot install any updates.
Is anyone else having this issue? On windows XP the CPU usage seems to get pegged at 100% even right after a reboot (doing nothing) and on server '03 the svhost takes 25% CPU at all times.
We are going through as we can and getting server '08 and windows 7 rolled out as we can but needless to say this issue is really hurting business for those still on XP/03
Any advice/insight is greatly appreciated
ijerry