For the past couple weeks, I’ve been using VMWare on Vista to load a saved Windows XP image in which I do some specialized work. I’ve been frustrated because every time I start the image, my CPU bounces to 100% – about 50% for the VMWare process and about 50% for the mysterious Mr. SVCHOST.EXE.

If I manually kill the SVCHOST process, my network goes away. One or two cycles of diagnose/repair usually fixes it, and then I’m good to go for the rest of the day.

I resolved this morning to get to the bottom of it, and I believe the culprit is the ReadyBoost service. After disabling that service and restarting the machine, no more SVCHOST bullshit when I start the VM. I don’t use ReadyBoost capabilities anyway – I have 4 GB of physical RAM, which is fine for me – so disabling it would appear to not pose any problems.