14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Windows XP will be retired very soon, Microsoft is still trying to fix all bugs reported by users on the aging operating system. Truth is, it takes quite a lot of time to get a fix for Windows XP, but Microsoft says that it's doing its best to release patches as soon as possible.
This time, Doug Neal, senior program manager for Windows, said in a post on PatchManagement that a fix for the SVCHOST bug causing processors to reach 100 percent usage on Windows XP is likely to be provided soon.
The issue has been around for a while, and even though Microsoft said that it was looking into the matter a few months ago, no fix has been released.
This time, Neal explains that Redmond will do its best to provide users with a fix, after November and December Patch Tuesdays failed to bring a fully-working patch.
“We took what we believed were the right steps to expire large chunks of superseded (outdated, unnecessary) updates in the IE6 and IE7 sup ersedence lists. Testing suggested this would be sufficient and we made the change on the backend in a release in October that expired these many unnecessary updates,” Neal explained.
“Turns out the Windows Update Agent has smarts built into it that outsmarted us and the problem persisted for the majority of impacted customers. We made a more comprehensive change in November and an even larger set of logic and expiration changes in December. Unfortunately, the problem still wasn't solved.”
Even though it appears that Microsoft has managed to identify the cause of the problem, no release date has been provided, which means that it could take a while until users get the fix.
“I appreciate your patience. And want to let you know we're working through the holiday to provide the right fix as soon as possible. As you can imagine, we don't have an ETA. And we want to make sure the next fix is the last and comprehensively solves this for our customers,” Neal concluded.