Vista Offline Files/CPU usage bug

I have an HP Pavillion notebook (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) running Windows Vista
Business. My computer seems to be slowing down every few minutes with 100%
cpu being used, for a full 2 minutes, then goes back to normal condition
again. After days upon days of troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to the
CSCService service, which is releated to "Offline Files". I did a google
search on it and discovered that many other people are having this same
issue, but no clear resolution has been found aside from telling people to
disable it entriely.

My problem is that I rely on Offline Files because I use two computers
regularly: My notebook when I'm in the field, and my office PC (also running
Windows Vista Business) when I'm in the office. Previously, it was a
nightmare trying to sync files between my notebook and file server (Windows
2003) at the office. The Vista Offline Files option I thought was the
perfect answer, and it does what it's supposed to do. But at the cost of
consuming my CPU every 2-3 minutes for 2 minutes at a time.

It's highly irritating. It's happening right now as I'm typing this post.
(one letter is appearing every 5-10 seconds).

Does anyone know of a clear way to fix the Vista Offline Files/CPU usage
problem ***without*** disabling Offline Files??? It would be great to use my
computer normally for more than a couple of minutes without locking up.

Oh, and FYI I cannot just temporarily disable offline files and re-enable it
later to fix, as doign this messes up the network connection requiring me to
reboot to see my network files again when I'm connected. So that's out of
the question (I shouldn't have to do this anyway).

Help!

[schatenjager]

I too have this problem. My boss and I both use Vista (mine is Business, his is Ultimate). I connect to one network share (around 7GB) and he connects to four shares (total of 22GB). We are both set to use offline files. On my laptop, I get very few performance hits although the hard disk is almost constantly active. My boss' laptop though suffers nearly to the point where it's unusable for much of the day. I have spent a lot of time researching and tracing the problems and here's what i've come up with:

1) The offline files service (CSCService) is definately doing a background synchronization every 5 minutes.
2) The synchronization occurs five minutes after the previous job ended.
3) The synchronization on my laptop seems to take around 30 seconds to perform. On my boss' laptop it takes 19 minutes.
4) The registry, service applet, and configuration information for the CSCService appears to have nothing that would allow me to space out these background syncs.
5) If I tell the machine to "work offline", the syncs do stop, but i am then using cached copies of the network files.
6) Working offline prevents manually scheduled syncs from running also, but I can still manually initiate a sync by pressing the "sync all" option in sync center.
7) I can see the individual synchronizations occur in the Event Viewer but only if I turn on all of the hidden logging functions for Offline Files. They do not appear in the Operational log.
8) The results of the background syncs do not appear within sync center unless there was a conflict or error, in which case the errors/conflicts show up but the "last sync" still reflects my last manual sync, not the background sync that generated the error in the first place.
9) There is no discernable task in the Vista Task Scheduler that I can see running that has anything to do with offline files.
10) Turning off the BITS service doesn't stop the background syncing so it's not using the intelligent transfer service to do this.
11) There are no options present in the Group Policy for frequency of background synchronization.
12) Technet, Google, nor the MS Knowledge Base has any references to scheduling the background synchronization.

It appears that for now, there is little that can be done about this. I have determined that the registry does have keys for the CSCService and that there are obviously keys that work in the registry to modify the service (such as the client side cache formatting key that must be manually created). I would assume that there are other valid keys that could be created to modify this schedule from its default behavior but I do not know what they are nor what their values would be.

Emails to the Vista dev team have not been answered.

The functionality of the background synchronization service is probably required for the online/offline switching but this should be modifiable to avoid extraneous synchronization every five minutes.


If anyone ever reads this that knows anything about how to fix it, we anxiously await your response! I have seen this problem reported in numerous places but no one seems to know how to resolve it.

Additionally, the usual suggestion that i've seen on the web is to simply disable Offline Files to avoid the excess utilization but there are those of us that need to use Offline Files and cannot simply turn it off. There MUST be another solution that to either deal with it or avoid it altogether...