Sygate firewall using 100% CPU

Hi,

I am running sygate personal firewall at home and have been for 18 months or so. Every few days or so the CPU jumps to 100% and stays there. This only happens when the PC was left alone for a while, but not every time you leave it for a while. I have been reading a few posts of people with similar problems but have not found an answer yet.

Looking at the task manager I can see that smc.exe takes up 99-100% of CPU and according to my temperature meter the cpu is burning hot and have been for ages. Initially I thought it was the HD or network card going into sleep mode, so I disabled the sleep mode function on both of them. This didn't work. If I cant find a solution soon I am going back to Zone Alarm, it might be a dog but at least it won't fry my CPU.

I also know I don't have a virus and run Ad-aware all the time (both in normal windows and safe mode to be extra safe). I am running XP Pro SP2, this was happening before SP2 though.

Has anyone experienced a similar problem or does anyone have anything that I could try because I'm tearing my hair out...

Reply to
MBsteve
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Sygate has always tended to use a little more cpu% than the others, but in my experience this only amounted to 3% or so when idling. Looks like there is some conflict or problem there for sure, and the best thing might be to just dump it and move on to something else. There are many free firewalls.

Reply to
Kerodo

Hi Steve!

My Sygate is very good :) The best firewall in my humble opinion. No problem. (Hmm Windows FTP client seems to suffer drawbacks thou...) Much better than Windows default firewall!

Reegards

Med vänliga hälsningar: Sven-Olov Larsson

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Reply to
Svempa

Thanks for the advice. I have since discovered that MSN Messenger, which starts up with MS Outlook, could have been the cause of the firewall losing it. I don't use messenger so I didn't even think to inspect it, but I found that it was running as a process which starts with Outlook but doesn't kill the process when outlook closes. Outlook has an option to disable it starting up. I have tried this and haven't had any problems in almost a week now. So hopefully this solves the problem.

Thanks MBSteve

Reply to
MBSteve

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