Since several weeks now I experienced a mouse poblem (and some noticable general speed slowdown). At first I thought that it was my new almost one year old mouse which was acting up... After a good dusting, I fielded back my original mouse. It's still working fine, the new mouse was bought to use special buttons for games like WoW, games I don't play anymore anyways. Problem was: the old mouse was acting up exactly the same way.
Tonight I noticed that I had by mistake minimized the Windows task manager. When you do that, you have a new icon bottom right showing you the CPU usage of your computer... And I noticed that it was 100% full. Investigating the matter further, I noticed that helpsrv.exe was eating all my CPU power.
Killed the process and, a short search on the 'net later, learned that Microsoft uphold their reputation in sh*tty programming well. The process is part of the help and assistance protocol of Windows. Ever seen a program crash and then a window asking you to report it come up? Or you have some problems with something and you click on the "what is this?" link? That's what it does. And it does it all alone: by default this process start up when Windows boot up. And for most of us, computer smart people... That's completely useless!
The help assist process seem to act up only after long period of inactivity. You might never notice until you leave your computer alone for a while and your screensaver was working for a while... Do yourself a favor and go kill the process before it get out of hand. In Windows process options you can desactivate the help assist process and select its startup to be manual instead of automatic.
Once it's done then you're free of trouble... Until another retarded problem arise.
