Memory Leaks and Slowdowns

[amadjuster]

After cleaning out a minor trojan, I started noticing a slowdown to a crawl after booting up. This has been getting worse since February but became critical Friday morning. After a lot of reboots and mumbling, I finally found that the culprits were AdobeUpdater.exe and swdsvr.exe. Both swapped out 99% of the CPU which left noting else. It was weird because they did not use that much of the memory but totally ate the CPU. It seems that Adobe changed the updater program when Reader 8 came out and it was also incorporated into Acrobat 8 and some CS3 programs ( the Adobe tech was hazy on this). This updater has a bad habit of getting shut down before it finishes, or just fails to finish like it is in a loop and will restart every time you boot up. The logjam of Adobe updates keeps getting longer and longer and you end up with a major case of digital constipation. The only fix was to go to the Updater5 folder and delete the contents and then delete those from the trash so they would not reinstall. I now have to do manual updates but it sure is faster. The other program is tied to Spyware Doctor, a PCTOOLS product. On their forum, their tech said that the CPU problem was because someone was running Norton and Spyware Doctor and Norton don't get along. Then someone chimed in reminding the tech that swdsvc.exe is a Norton anti-virus program and the tech stopped replying. I turned that one off and went back to my old standby and the computer smokes again. The funny thing about the AdobeUpdater is that it works just fine on my Dell laptop. The Adobe tech said this is a "known issue" and they have been working on it since February, 2007. I wanted to post this here in case someone else is having slowdown issues and knows something is running in the background but can't figure out what it is. Click you ALT-CONTROL-DELETE and check the Processes to see if something is hogging the CPU.

[DJ.]

If you are so inclined, this is another very good solution for troubleshooting. It was a good utility even before Microsoft acquired Winternals. It has many helpful troubleshooting features.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx

[JamesB]

i have been having a very hard time with adobe updater trying to update the free reader and it takes forever. several other co-workers are having this same problem i am. maybe its the updater on our systems

James

[amadjuster]

This is apparently one of those "known" issues that one tech knows about and the other one doesn't. Google AdobeUpdater memory leaks and read on. There was even a beta fix that was given out and then withdrawn. I first went to the Photoshop tech support and then to Acrobat support. Here's how we got rid of this problem. Go to My Computer, then to Program Files, then Common Files, then Adobe, then to the Update5 folder. Highlight and delete all files in the folder, then empty the Trash so the files are gone. Keep the folder. No more problem.

The tech also recommended deleting Reader 8 and reinstalling version 7. The problems seem to center on Reader 8.

Good luck!