How do I determine what taskhost.exe is doing?

Once or twice a week taskhost.exe slows my computer to a halt! It takes up 25% of my CPU power (ie. 1 processor). I can't kill it an have no idea what it is doing. I imagine that its some kind of window's scheduled activity.

How can I figure out what is causing this problem? How can I stop it?

Solution 1:

TaskHost.exe itself is a wrapper for dll or other exe and run as a windows service.

3 things to try

#1

Before spending time hunting down what taskhost actual loaded. Check Event Viewer for errors. That may give out a quick answer or point you to the right direction.

#2

Open Task Manager, go to Processes tab. On menu bar (top), click View -> Select Columns.... In pop-up windows, select Command Line.

That may give you an idea which dll taskhost.exe loaded.

Additionally, pay attention at the path of taskhost.exe. It should be

<Windows directory>\System32\Taskhost.exe

If not, you may have other problem.

#3

Same idea as #2, but use a better tools. Download Process Explorer from Microsoft. It is free. It is able to give more details of running process.

Solution 2:

Turns out this was caused by the "RacTask" (Reliability Analysis Custom Handler). I used the Task Scheduler to view "All Running Tasks" and then killed it from there. The problem was immediately addressed.

http://screencast.com/t/1LJUbkdNGbwS

The suggestion to try this was taken from this thread...

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/5032-63-taskhost-running