Rundll.exe using whole CPU to run appraiser.dll after Feb 2015 updates

Question

Hi,

Since faithfully installing the Feb 2015 updates, I have found the next day that rundll.exe is constantly using 12.5% of my CPU (equivalent to a whole CPU on an i7 chip). On investigating the command line in Task Manager it shows that rundll.exe is running "appraiser.dll DoScheduledTelemetryRun".

With some web investigation I find that the dll is published by  Microsoft and is called a Compatibility Appraiser for Windows 10. Is this correct? I can't find where I originally got that information. Since my computer was going crazy and appraiser.dll was interfering with the operation of other applications (ones that I actually wanted and needed to use), the fans are running at full speed to keep my CPU temp under 70 degrees celsius.

Do I need to have my system appraised for upgrade? I THINK NOT!!! Surely this should be a user's choice. I actually have no intention of upgrading my operating system until this computer (which I purchased in Nov 2014) does its 4 years of service. Then and ONLY then will I look at a new OS. Microsoft you have committed to supporting Windows 7 until 2020, so I have no need to upgrade, and Microsoft should have no need to assume that I want to.

So what I did first time was uninstall the Feb 2015 updates. Problem gone. But I know there are other worthwhile updates so yesterday I reinstalled them and this morning I turn on my PC to find rundll -> appraiser.dll at 12.5% again. My machine has been on for 2 hours now and it is still running at 12%.

So what is the exact update that installed this Compatibility Appraiser? I need to uninstall and block it from installing because it is certainly not compatible with me. 

Is appraiser.dll triggered from Task Scheduler? If this is the case, can you please provide instructions on the best way of managing the process from Task Scheduler?

Can you please release a patch to the update that does the job properly for all those users that might want to update to Windows 10?

Perhaps if you want to appraise my machine for Windows 10 compatibility, you should write more efficient code and run the process at low priority so us bleeping users don't even know what information you are extracting from us.

I will now go and have a look in Task Scheduler!

Answer 1

I have had a problem with the telemetry file, having discovered that my 2TB hard drive was filled with the telemetry file at 1.8TB.  This was under C:\Windows\AppCompat\Appraiser\Telemetry

Interesting - I checked this on two machines, and here the files in Telemetry are "only" 145 MB and 5 MB, respectively. 1.8 TB sounds indeed like something went very, very wrong...

ciao marcus

Answer 2

I'm doing quite lots of simulation and rendering right now and I need every part of my cpu. I do not even have much time. They really could just ask for the user permission if he wants to run quite a heavy performance task - it really slows me down and I would rather like to kill the process.

Answer 3

The answers and help on this discussion are fantastic. My laptop has been running slower and slower through the day, every day for the last couple of months. I just assumed it was a memory leak with not a lot I could do about it. Had no idea this process was scheduled to start up every day at 3pm. Dhoh! Feel like a fool for not spotting it earlier.

So, I've

• killed the process for today.
• Opted out of the customer improvement plan in the control panel.
• Turned off the scheduled "Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser" process in the computer management console.

Instructions for all those things are in this thread. Thank you all for posting these details. All these settings are very deep in unintuitive places, and I would not have even known they existed, let alone know how to get to them, without this thread.

Answer 4

where do i find the AitAgent and programdataupdater?

Answer 5

This is very interesting and provided a clues to my own investigation on this issue.

I'm running 8.1 and don't have the appraiser.dll file on my system. I wasn't particularly concerned about CPU usage, but rather more about a log file called Autologger-Diagtrack-Listener.etl which updates itself every day.

The location for it is this one: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Diagnosis\ETLLogs\AutoLogger\AutoLogger-Diagtrack-Listener.etl

And here's the registry key for it: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\WMI\Autologger\AutoLogger-Diagtrack-Listener

I tried to view the contents of the ETL file - this file type can be opened with Event Viewer - however, it shows itself to be completely blank in spite of being 64KB. Initially, I thought that I was wrong about being able to open ETL files in EV and opened another one called eventlog.etl instead. But I was able to view the contents of that without a problem.

Doing a Google search turned up a great many pointers to it being Telemetry related. The Diagnostic Tracking service which is supposed to be related to ETL file was nowhere to be found in the Services console either. Neither do I have it running under it's new name called Customer User Experience and Telemetry.

However, Google pointed these to be related to Windows 10 which I have no intention of upgrading to. In addition, I haven't installed any of the Telemetry updates which M$ has been dishing out of late and tend to scrutinize each update which arrives in Windows Update before considering installing it. In that respect, I have Automatic Updates disabled.

The registry key mentioned above expands to several more subkeys one of which is called {DD17FA14-CDA6-7191-9B61-37A28F7A10DA}. Since I wasn't getting any joy tracking down the Autologger file, I started searching for that instead. I tried several of the others as well, but came up mainly with references to them in a Chinese blog which I didn't understand.

Fortunately, the above subkey led me to this Pastebin file: http://pastebin.com/C3dHDYYR

The subkey can be found about halfway down the page as: "UTC:::PROVIDERDEFINITION.MICROSOFT.WINDOWS.APPRAISER.GENERAL": "dd17fa14-cda6-7191-9b61-37a28f7a10da".

Searching in turn for Windows.Appraiser.General led me to the Infoworld article and to its relationship to the Customer Experience Improvement Program. However, I opted out of that ages ago. On an 8.1 machine, the option to do so can be found by clicking the Action Center icon on the taskbar (looks like a flag) and click Open Action Center. Navigate from there by clicking "Change Action Center Settings" top left and then near the bottom, click "Customer Experience Improvement Program". So mine is clearly set to "No, I don't want to participate......".

Yet when I opened Task Scheduler ---> Task Scheduler Library ---> Microsoft ---> Windows ---> Application Experience, I was horrified to find that my opt-out has been ignored completely from day one and everything I've been doing on the machine is (or was) being relayed to Microsoft. Here's a screenshot I took before deleting the tasks.

So it seems my wishes to opt-out of the CEIP were being completely ignored.

I've taken appropriate steps now to ensure that it doesn't run anymore, but I've extremely annoyed that Microsoft simply ignored my wishes not to participate in the CEIP.