I'm having a really strange problem with my work PC. We use a custom Access database as a stock system, during Friday one of the buttons in it stopped doing anything. Over the next 15 minutes, the system slowed to a crawl, and Task Manager showed that services.exe was trying to use 100% CPU.

My immediate thought was that it had picked up something nasty so I did full scans with AVG, Malware Bytes and Super Anti Spyware; this, as you can probably imagine, took bloody ages so I left it to it overnight.

Coming back to it on Saturday, all 3 programs reported a clean bill of health. I then used Process Explorer to see what was going on with services.exe. This suggested that UMPNPMGR.DLL was responsible for chewing up the CPU, so I switched off the Plug and Play service in msconfig and rebooted.

This time, the computer was responsive, and services.exe behaved itself. However I couldn't print - not surprising really. It did suggest that I'd found the root of the problem.

The only hardware installed recently was a USB Zip drive, for which I'd installed the Iomega tools, so I uninstalled all of that. I took the opportunity to uninstall some other stuff, like USB audio interfaces, which still had drivers kicking around.

I then cleaned the registry with CCleaner, and used sfc.exe to check the system files; no repairs were necessary.

My next step I guess is to try a repair installation - I didn't have any XP disks to hand, but I'll take one in tomorrow.

Any further ideas? I need Plug and Play on so I can print. And my button's still not working in Access!

which version of access ? and is it a standard print button or a custom one in access?

I have seen this before and knew instantly it would be a print problem as soon as you said it was services.exe.

Iirc when I've seen it in the past there was stuff in the print queues (possibly network printers?) and I had to disable the print service and purge all the queues. Once that was done it sorted it out without having to do too much work.

Have a google for print problems and services.exe.

HTH

I think the printer issue is a red herring here - the reason I can't print is that I've had to turn the Plug and Play service off to make the machine usable. There are no network printers, just an HP laserjet connected by USB. There's nothing in the print queue, and I turned the printer off whilst troubleshooting.

In Access it's a custom button. I think it's Access 2007.

Problem solved. I got a new PC.

I find this solution works for most problems.

I find getting a non-Windows computer normally works best of all