Sunday, May 06, 2007

100% CPU usage by spoolsv.exe in Win XP

Spoolsv.exe is a windows server application to manage printing queue. My friend had problem in his laptop becuase this application was using 100 % CPU; hence, computer was very slow. If you kill it, it will start again in a few minutes.
The problem was caused by the fact, that there were few files in a queue to print, but no printer. Hence, he went to C:\windows\system32\spool\PRINTER and deleted everything what was there. Sometimes you must first kill spoolsv.exe in task manager prior to removing files. This helped.