OK, after working on it for a few hours, I figured it out myself. It has to do with a failing IE feed reader scheduled task, which as it happens runs every 5 minutes!
I have Vista RC1 SP1 Refresh installed, so I'm not sure if that was a related cause....
Anyway, here's the solution:
- Go to the start menu.
- Type task scheduler and press enter.
- Press continue on the UAC popup.
- In the left pane of task scheduler, underneath Task Scheduler Local, right-click on Task Scheduler Library.
- In the View submenu, make sure the Show Hidden Tasks option is checked.
- Widen the Name column in the center pane. The hidden task that is likely at fault has a name that starts with User_Feed_Synchronization, followed by a dash and a bunch of digits inside a curly brace.
- Select that task in the middle pane by clicking on its name.
- To verify that this scheduled task is creating all those taskeng.exe processes, select the History tab in the middle pane near the middle of the screen. If you expand out the Level and Date and Time Columns, you should see a bunch of errors and date and times that are 5 minutes apart. If that's the case, then this task is the problem.
- On the rightmost pane, select Disable.
- There may be more than one scheduled task like this, so you'd need to disable any or all that were causing problems.
That should do it! It worked for me, anyway. Let me know how that goes...hope it helps!
Nick Hain
Melbourne, Australia