WmiPrvSE.exe is REALLY getting on my nerves

I'm sure that many of you know what this leech of process is, so I just want to know if I really need it on my system. I'm sick of cooling down my laptop just for it to randomly come along and push my CPU temps up 20C! Does it really do something so important that it needs to be active and take up 25% of my CPU? If not, how can I get rid of it?

 

I'm having an issue with it on an older PC with WinXP right now. Every 10-15 minutes an error message comes up related to it saying memory could not be written, press ok to close the program press cancel to debug. Neither option seems to do anything.

What does the process even do?

 

Its Windows Management Instrumentation process... and it's better left alone. Cheers...

Here

 

Amazingly the full name of the process sheds no light on what it actually does.

 

Nope, no idea what you could be talking about. I never notice that one.

 

I Googled it weeks ago, worried that it was a virus. I was just asking here out of desperation, hoping to find some type of solution, like a way to find out whoich program is using it...

I stand corrected.

 

When did it start? Did you update any drivers around the time it started eating up your CPU? I'm betting you have a rogue driver that's causing it to go batty.

 

I read somewhere while that it *could* be due to the graphics driver... I don't remember where I saw it, but it was from a google search result...

 

I've only ever manually updated the graphics driver for the 5650. Considering the fact that this would confirm my suspicion that it only happens when the 5650 is the active GPU, you may be right. *sigh* I HATE installing that driver! >_< But I have no choice...

What's the best driver sweeper to use?

 

Well, it's not the graphics driver. :/ Maybe it's the network driver?

 

This is not normal. Some other program you are running is causing the high cpu usage in the WMI process. It may be your CPU temperature monitor, or something like that that manages hardware. Try booting into safe mode and not running any programs and you should see this process's CPU usage go down to about 0%.

 

It doesn't stay at 25% constantly; it's usually at 0%, but then it randomly goes up and stays there for a minute or two before going idle again. The thing is, sometimes it starts up again 30 seconds later, and this frequency is the issue.

After reinstalling the graphics driver and updating the network driver, however, it hasn't happened for the past few hours since then...