Windows – Why is ccmexec thrashing the disk

bloatwareperformancewindows xp

I run continously run Serious Samurize to show graphs of CPU, disk and network usage. Occasionally I see that my E: drive (a hard disk with no system files on it, only data) is thrashing away when it shouldn't be (showing around 50% bandwidth usage on the graph). Using process explorer I see that the culprit is CcmExec, a standard Windows component. It looks like it is reading every file on the disk.

So, my question, why is CcmExec doing this to me? And, how do I stop it? Suspending CcmExec from process explorer works well, but I have to remember to do this every time I start my machine. I suspect there's a better way to tell it to keep its dirty fingers of my E drive.

I'm running Windows XP on a company network.

Best Answer

CcmExec is part of the Systems Management Server from Microsoft. There are a couple of articles on MSDN blogs that address this issue. You should be able to stop this from happening by stopping the "SMS Agent Host" service.

Jonathan Hardwick offers three ways of turning off the service:

  • From the command line: sc stop ccmexec and sc start ccmexec (where sc is c:\windows\system32\sc.exe)
  • From the GUI #1: open the services list, right-click on the SMS Agent Host service, and select Stop or Start.
  • From the GUI #2: having typed sc stop ccmexec and sc start ccmexec into Start>Run, use the drop-down history menu at the end of the Run box to re-run them whenever you want to.
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