Windows – How to get more info on high-CPU rundll32.exe process

cpuprocessrundll32.exewindows 7

I recently clean-installed Win7 on my HP8530. Everything works well most of the time, but for the last few days, every morning after my computer has been idle overnight, I find that rundll32.exe is consuming a steady 50% of CPU (i.e. all of one processor). The only way I can make it go away is by restarting.

Process Explorer has no information on what the process is running. If I try to do anything to rundll32.exe (kill process, suspend, etc.) I get "Error opening process: Access is denied." None of the tabs in the ProcExp properties dialog has any information at all.

I have Norton Internet Security running with the latest definitions; I've run a full system scan and it gives me a clean bill of health.

How can I get more information on why this process is running?

Best Answer

We had this occur on several print servers that we had configured. When we looked at it in Process Explorer, we would get a command line such as

rundll32 C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\hpmsn6bu.DLL,MonitorPrintJobStatus /pjob=135 /pname"PRINTER01"

After much research, we figured out that this only happened on machine that were using the HP Universal Printing Driver (both PCL 5 and PCL 6 flavors). This is a feature of of the HP UPD named Status Notification Pop-ups (SNPs). According to the HP website

SNPs provide immediate job information and printer status information by a small pop-up window on the client PC. SNPs also provide current information about printer consumables, such as toner levels and links to HP SureSupply ordering system and HP Instant Support page. The SNP feature, which displays during the submittal of a print job, is fully configurable through a variety of tools available to print administrators.

More information can be found here

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