What is this WinMgmt error?

Carbo

Diamond Member
Aug 6, 2000
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Running W2K Pro, and receiving this error at startup:

WMI ADAP was unable to load the winspool.drv performance library due to an unknown problem within the library: 0x0

Any ideas? Thank you.
 

jaywallen

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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This is one of the performance monitor error messages that plague some systems. You can take several approaches:

1. Ignore the message(s). They don't do any real harm. However, this can be hard advice to take. After all, if you were the type of person who ignores warning messages, you wouldn't be looking in the Event Viewer!

2. The performance library dredger sometimes gets confused and thinks that the library is corrupt. This is likely to be the case on your system, and if it is, the following procedure will clear it up -- until it happens again. First of all, crank up your Task Manager. Look on the Processes tab for the Process ID (PID) of the WinMgmt process. Then issue these two commands, in the order given, from a CMD prompt:

winmgmt /clearadap

winmgmt /resyncperf -p PID

where "PID" is replaced by the current PID of the WinMgmt process as shown in Task Manager.

3. If the error occurs repeatedly, you can disable the offending monitoring process. If you have the W2K Resource Kit (Professional or Server), use the exctrlst.exe utility to kill the culprit so that it doesn't run. In the case you've cited you'd be looking for winspool.drv. Actually, you can turn off ALL of the performance monitors. If you don't need to be using performance monitoring, you don't need the monitors to be running. In particular, the PerDisk monitor is kind of a resource hog as monitors go. You can see some small improvement in disk performance on most systems when you stop that monitor. If you don't have the W2K Resource Kit, you can download exctrlst.exe from Microsoft. I'm sorry that I don't know the URL off-hand, but let me know if you want it and can't find it. I'll locate it and post it.

4. If you wish/need to use Performance Monitoring on your system but wish to get rid of the error messages, you can alter / create different CollectTimeout and WbemAdapStatus values from the default values under the Performance keys for the various services that give you errors. For instance, for the spooler service monitor message you'd look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler\Performance. A related registry change is to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Wbem\CIMOM and change the ADAPPerflbTimeout value upward. However, doing this stuff requires some thought and effort that just isn't worth it unless you truly need to be monitoring performance. (Most personal users, and even most business users, don't. I only monitor performance routinely when setting up server or critical workstation configurations, and I monitor "mission-critical" servers constantly.)

BTW, you can also disable a performance counter for a given service by going to the appropriate Performance key in the registry and adding a REG_DWORD value named "Disable Performance Counters" (no quotes) and setting its value to 1. But using exctrlst.exe is much easier. It's a tiny file (24 KB), so downloading is no problem if you don't have the reskit.

Hope this is helpful.

Regards,
Jim
 

Carbo

Diamond Member
Aug 6, 2000
5,275
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Jay, many thanks for the info. It was more involved than I thought but it did the trick.
As regards your #1: correct. If someone looks for problems, when found they will not ignore them.
#2: issued the commands as you specified, then rebooted. The winspool error did not show up in the events log. Problem resolved. Again, thank you.
#3: this is a cool tweak you turned me on to. Downloaded it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/exctrlst-o.asp
My one question now is, are ALL 15 items listed performance monitors? Or is it just the items preceeded by "perf", for example perfdisk.dll? And I can shut all or them down without doing harm, unless I'm needing to monitor performance?
 

jaywallen

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2000
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Yup, those are all performance counters. AFAIK there is no problem with disabling every single one, though I have never had to do that. As a rule, I differentiate my system configurations from default only when there is a specific reason to do so. There is a specific reason to disable perfdisk (performance). And any counter that's giving you trouble is also a good one to disable. I doubt that disabling every single one will cause any adverse behaviors on your system, but, not having actually tried it before, I can't be absolutely sure. I can say that there is no LOGICAL reason to think that there would be a problem. On the other hand leaving the ones that don't cause issues up and running means that you'll get a warning in your Event Viewer if there are substantial performance changes (enough to cause a collect timeout failure) in one of your devices or services.

I think most performance counter errors in W2K are due to overly stringent settings for the data collection timeouts. I typically see more of these errors on notebooks, for instance, which have slower devices. However, you should always bear in mind that a counter error could possibly reflect an actual problem with hardware / driver / service configuration. But you can usually diagnose such issues without a need for the performance monitoring functions. On mission-critical systems, the performance monitors can make you aware of an incipient or insidious problem early on that you might otherwise miss. But the noise-to-signal ratio tends to favor the noise, so I only actually employ extensive monitoring (use of Performance Monitor to monitor the Performance Counters) on a select few systems.

I hope I didn't waffle too much for this reply to be useful.

Regards,
Jim