'search filter host' constantly high cpu usage

[Marin85]

Hi,

I reinstalled Windows 7 on my ThinkPad 3 days ago and noticed something unusual to me (meaning has never happened before) since. The process 'Windows Search Filter Host' constantly takes up to 40-45% cpu usage, fluctuating, but never calming down, as soon as Windows is up. This has been so for the past 3 days now, and I am truely clueless what might be causing this. The installation is clean and fresh and presence of malware is excluded (already scanned). I have 'allow files having contents indexed in addition to file properties' on my disk disabled, but even with full indexing enabled this process activity should not be present (I think). In any case, I haven´t observed anything like this on any installation of Windows 7 I have had before. A little bit more details: I have about 100 GB in .pdfs, .djvus (most of them OCRed), source, tex, word and excel files and similar. As for programs, I have installed what I have always had: Office 2007 (though removed Groove afterwards as I don´t need it), Nero 8, VirtualBox, VMware 7 trial, Matlab, Visual Studio 2008 and then applied SP1 to VS (gosh, it takes an eternity to update), Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, and some media players (winamp, vlc and k-lite mega codec pack). At least, those seem to me to be able to cause strange issues... Now, I could easily neutralize the process, but I am not sure I should do it, whatever it is currently doing, might be important (especially after having installed tons of updates for Windows 7) as I read somewhere that this process also tries to optimize the system performance (for some/what? tasks). So, if I know that it will eventually go back to normal, I don´t have a problem with that (yet), but consuming almost 50% cpu can get annoying over time.

So, any ideas what might be the reason?

Thanks,

Marin

EDIT:Oh, yes, and there is another external USB HD attached to the laptop now... (however, all HDDs with indexing disallowed).

[Marin85]

Update: disabling and re-enabling the .xml file type in advanced indexing options, then letting windows 'rebuild' the index seems to solve the unusually high cpu usage of the 'filter host' process for now...

[K0LO]

Marin:

I had the same thing happen a couple of weeks ago on one machine after upgrading to Office 2010 (on 2 other machines the upgrade went without issue). Rebuilding the search index fixed it. I didn't need to exclude any file types. Probably rebooting the machine would have allowed the search indexer to fix itself but I didn't think to try that at the time.

[Marin85]

Mark, thanks for your response! I read somewhere that disabling the .xml file type supposedly solves the problem, that´s why I tried that, but then I thought that I might well need it, so I enabled it back and let the windows rebuild the index. I too think the .xml step was unnecessary. BTW, I have rebooted a few times since the initial install, but 'search filter host' just kept consuming cpu resources as soon as the system was up. Now, it seems it is back , so rebuilding the windows didn´t really help much.

[Marin85]

Well, the issue became way too annoying, so I completely disabled indexing of any folders. Surprisingly or not, this resolved the unusually high cpu usage completely! Sigh, I guess I won´t need indexing for only 90 GBs of files...