770 taskeng.exe process running

[ElAguila]

I am trying to help my friend troubleshoot his system. He has Vista Ultimate x32 with SP1 installed. After his pc is boot up for a few minutes the task manager shows over 700 instances of the taskeng.exe process running. It is using 55% of his total ram. I looked on the task scheduler and with everything he has in there there only 26 tasks listed and several of those a default windows tasks. Any idea why this is happening? He also has an apple iTouch installed with iTunes and it associated services as well as windows mobile device center. I have wmdc on mine as well but that doesnt' happen to me. Is the apple services causing this?

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Go to the start menu.

Type task scheduler and press enter.

Press continue on the UAC popup.

In the left pane of task scheduler, underneath Task Scheduler Local, right-click on Task Scheduler Library.

In the view submenu, make sure the Show Hidden Tasks option is checked.

Widen the name column in the center pane. The hidden task that is likely at fault has a name that starts with User_Feed_Synchronization followed by a dash and a bunch of digits inside a curly brace.

Select the scheduled task in the middle pane by clicking on its name.

To verify that this task is creating all those taskeng.exe processes, select the History tab in the middle pane near the middle of the screen. If you expand out the Level and Date and Time Columns, you should see a bunch of errors and date and times that are 5 minutes apart. If that's the case, then this task is the problem.

On the rightmost pane of the task scheduler, select Disable.

There may be more than one scheduled task like this (relating to feeds), so you'd need to disable any or all that were causing problems.

[ElAguila]

There were 2 of them set to run every 5 minutes. I have disabled them and rebooted. I will see if that fixes it. Is it okay to delete those tasks?

[Kelsenellenelvian]

As far as I can tell yes it is.