Win2000 - SERVICES.EXE using 100% CPU

I think the title and the screen shot below say it all. The file SERVICES.EXE seems to spike up to 100% CPU about every 90-120seconds. Then it goes back to normal for up to 3 minutes or so, then spikes again, and it does this over and over and over continuously. It makes doing anything on the PC very frustrating and slow going. If I try something simple like opening My Computer, it may take 2 minutes open, or it might open right away, but trying to open C: after that will 2 minutes, same with Internet Explorer....

Ideas?

 

The PID with that services is winlogon.exe but there is a virus that goes by winIogon.exe
Sure, they may look the same but I typed the first one using a small el and the second one using a capital eye. Can you kill the process?
Do a search and see if you have two of these, a legitimate one and a virus.

Found this
PID: 216 ( 188) C:\WINNT\system32\services.exe
size: 89360
I checked in my 2K computer and the size of my file is 98304 bytes and it was created Tuesday Dec. 7, 1999 and modified April 8, 2005. Now those dates could refer to installs of 2k on the computer - at this stage I don't know.

 

No. It says the process is required by the system and won't allow me to terminate it. I don't have access to the PC right now so I can't tell if the file sizes and dates correspond to the same ones you posted. But in the screen shot it shows the size being 8688k, and you reported that yours is 89360k... that's a pretty huge difference, unless yours is 89360 bytes, then they're pretty darn close in size.... as soon as I look at it tomorrow, I'll post what I find out. I'm thinking there's a chance (if it's not a virus) that the hard drive may be failing or have some corrupt sectors in the services.exe file, causing the file to not run correctly and spike in usage because it's not being read from the hard drive cleanly....

 

dlb, I'm not sure what the 89360 is measured in - I copied the information from another site.
My 2K computer I had up at the time is 98304 bytes.
If they are both in bytes, then they are close. My larger size could be the result of 4 service packs and the #1 rollup installed.

TxTazDad, what file size are you showing?

 

I got it so that SERVICES.EXE only spikes to 100% right when the desktop loads up. It stays at 100% for maybe 3-4minutes, then drops down to zero and stays there. It was going up and down about every 2-3minutes but I got that figured out. On the plus side, the PC's owners only restart the PC maybe once a week so it isn't a huge issue. I recommended that they back up their personal data and that we wipe and reload at some point in the future, but it's not a pressing issue....

 

I had these issues before with processes other than services.exe, they used to take up 100% of CPU usage and the performance was very very poor. I solved it then by killing the processes and rebooting, or finding out which services are for which processes and set them to start manually.

Anyway, it is the first time I see a SERVICES.EXE, it is always services.exe (and it counts, sure it does)

Try using Process Explorer and see the list of processes that are running inside your SERVICES.EXE rolleyes