Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes, my old nemesis, WinHttpAutoProxySvc... For years, on both Windows 10 and 11, this has had the habit of randomly spiking the CPU core the service is running on to 100%, in some kind of busy-loop that's effectively preventing anything that uses the Win32 HTTP API from working.

So, if symptoms include laptop fan thinks it's a jet engine, Start menu refusing to fully populate, Search not responding, and a lot of apps just not launching at all (or taking several minutes to do so), a quick look at the Services tab in Task Manager for WinHttpAutoProxySvc, followed by go to details and End task on the corresponding svchost.exe might just do the trick. You can ignore the big scary warning about this restarting the system: that's a lie.

For a slightly more permanent fix, paste the following into a .reg file and merge it into your Registry:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinHttpAutoProxySvc]
    "Start"=dword:00000004

This will disable the service (which Microsoft has made impossible to do via regular GUI or CLI tooling), and after a reboot, you should be able to, like, use your PC for a while. Keep an eye open for rogue Windows Updates, though, as Microsoft really, really wants to re-enable this service using those. (Apparently, WinHttpAutoProxySvc does all kinds of important stuff, including address assignment for non-native IPv6 setups, none of which I care about, but before blindly following 'just disable this thing' advice from the Internet, just think for a while before rolling it out to your entire fleet).

Playing whack-a-mole with WinHttpAutoProxySvc has been oddly satisfying so far: one of these days I might actually grab a debugger to see what's going on here (because, yes, also after updating to Windows 11 22H2, which re-enabled the service, I had the same-old symptoms within days -- I admire the writer of this article for getting a fix for their problem that worked!)

> Ah, yes, my old nemesis

Windows.

i remember when registry tweaks wouldnt randomly reset and random bloatware would not appear/reappear with each OS update. those were the "good" old days of XP/2000.

anyways, i finally got fed up with Windows 10 Updates + Defender shenanigans and perma-switched to Linux (EndeavourOS/KDE). Oh, the joy of your machine only ever doing what you told it, and blazing fast filesystem access with low resource usage! Unthinkable!

Did this a decade ago. First feeling was "Ah! no more spyware, adware, nagware". I might have little, but whatever I have works to the end.

So did I but I had the bad luck of choosing Ubuntu so I lived in self-deny for a while before having to switch again.

> So did I but I had the bad luck of choosing Ubuntu

i hear nothing but good things about PoP_OS if you want to stick with a Ubuntu derivative.

certainly with linux you cannot just buy whatever hardware, but with just a bit of research (Intel Wifi, AMD gpu) everything works with 0 issues. im on a ryzen P14s AMD 4k-display thinkpad and only had to swap out the mediatek wlan card it came with for an Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (more stable, better perf, monitor mode etc)

Until one gets a Linux device that is managed by company IT exactly the same way as Windows machines.

This mentality is a common one I see when people comment on Windows: people setting an override that isn't actually the intended override to 'fix' an issue without root cause analysis by disabling a component, then complaining about the 'intended override' getting reverted with a system upgrade.

(and 'impossible using normal GUI/CLI tooling' seems unlikely, for one as regedit is still 'normal tooling' as well, and secondly because I've yet to come across a service that can't be disabled with the 'sc' command line utility, discounting Windows Defender though that is rather a special case due to the chance of malware itself disabling it, so it has a very specific series of steps to first disable the tamper protection in a trusted way and only then disable the service)

In this case it seems like an environment-specific issue, as if everyone would have this specific thing be broken, it'd probably long be noticed and fixed. In fact, one could probably easily find out what is wrong using a profiling session with WPR/WPA as the main symptom here is 'uses 100% of a CPU core', a methodology recently most famously spread by Google's Bruce Dawson.

(similarly, I wonder if these same people would 'complain' a Linux distro upgrade would affect their edits to /lib/systemd/system/*.service files - I would somewhat presume that to not be the case, in fact)

> I've yet to come across a service that can't be disabled with the 'sc' command line utility

Well, meet WinHttpAutoProxySvc...

    > sc config WinHttpAutoProxySvc start=disabled
    [SC] OpenService FAILED 5: Access is denied.

And yes, before you dial the condescension up to 11 again, I'm aware of the need to do this from an elevated command prompt, as demonstrated by the fact that it works fine for other services, e.g. Windows Update:

    > sc config wuauserv start=disabled
    [SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

(And, for the record, I was not complaining about anything, merely pointing out my environmentally specific experiences with the topic of an article, IMHO also clearly pointing out that my choice of solution is a gross hack and that I should look more closely into the issue one of these days when my copious spare time allows...)

Please, start with disabling WPAD requests and only then disable the service.

    type "Disable WPAD.reg"
    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Wpad]
    "WpadOverride"=dword:00000001

That way even if the WinHttpAutoProxySvc would be enabled it wouldn't be triggered by WPAD discovery.

I sometimes wonder if someone will someday tweet just what were they thinking?!? with a Ghidra screenshot of some quick feature I wrote before a deadline.

It's almost the year of Windows on the desktop it seems

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