Possible fix for XP-SP2 slowdown

[vailr]

From: http://leoville.tv/radio/pmwiki.php/ShowNotes/Show135

Bradley from Sydney, Australia writes:
?I work in a call center working on the service pack 2 technical support contract for Microsoft. I have noticed you have gotten a few questions about windows xp being slow after upgrading to SP2. Yes a lot of the times it is just spyware, however there is a flaw in the sp2 install that sets a regestry key to an incorrect value. If this key is incorrect it will make a pc run real slow. The key in question is
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs
and this key needs to be changed from
NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService
to:
LocalSystem
for it to run faster again.
I have noticed that this will fix about 40% of the slow pc?s after sp2 install. Hope this info can help anyone out.

 

[bsobel]

RPC was changed to run under a lower privledges account on purpose. While this 'fix' has been floating around the net, I have yet to see MS comment on it of any explanation of what it 'fixes'.

 

[Tedtalker1]

I just tried this so called fix and it did just the opposite-slowed my system to a crawl.Nothing would load after reboot.Changed the setting back to NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService and rebooted-all is well again.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: bsobel
RPC was changed to run under a lower privledges account on purpose. While this 'fix' has been floating around the net, I have yet to see MS comment on it of any explanation of what it 'fixes'.

So does this "fix" elevate the priviledges RPC is running under?

 

[spyordie007]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: bsobel
RPC was changed to run under a lower privledges account on purpose. While this 'fix' has been floating around the net, I have yet to see MS comment on it of any explanation of what it 'fixes'.

So does this "fix" elevate the priviledges RPC is running under?

Yes.

The "networkservice" account is a low privilage account; by contrast the localsystem account has unrestricted access. Changing the mentioned registry key changes which account the RPCSS service starts/runs under.

 

[Tedtalker1]

"Starting with Windows XP and continuing with Windows Server 2003, the account under which MSDTC service runs must be "NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService.If you change the account to something else other than NetworkService, your distributed transactions will fail because MSDTC will not be able to do mutual authentication with the other parties (transaction managers, resource managers, clients) involved in the transaction. In some cases, even the local transactions will fail." So that is why my system stalled after trying the LocalSystem setting. Good luck