VSMON.EXE and Internet bank site 2

[Rahosi]

Can anyone explain why I have to stop VSMON.EXE (from within Task Manager) when accessing a bank account (Egg.com). Otherwise my computer grinds to a halt. If I close VSMON.EXE during the problem, the computer largely recovers. During the problem VSMON shows 80+% CPU activity.

I have no problem accessing other (HSBC) banking sites.

Computer
XPpro, IE6, USB/ADSL, ZApro3, McAfee Virusscan.

Under IE6 privacy my cookies are set to accept First party, block Third party cookies but allow session cookies. However I have specifically allowed all cookies from all the banking sites

 

[joderale]

I just today noticed the problem with vsmon.exe hogging the CPU. Like many others, I have Zone Alarm Pro and Norton Antivirus. I tried Peter's suggestion: upgrading Zone Alarm. It seems to have solved the problem. CPU usage is 00% vs. 100% before.

Joder
Windows 2000 Pro
Athlon 1.0GHz

 

[Xaix]

I suggest you eliminate all of your spy ware. I’ve found that having a number of spy ware running with Zone Alarm Pro vsmon.exe roars up to about 250MB out of 768MB of RAM used after my pc runs over night. Just got rid of about 10 spy ware bugs and poof! No more huge vsmon.exe in my processes. Check it out. This time the amount of RAM used by vsmon.exe actually went down after reboot instead of slowly up uP UP! I don't believe in coincidence in the real world, let alone that of PCs.

Xaix

Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

 

[Xaix]

Well, after running all night i checked the vsmon.exe again today and it was using up 100MB of RAM instead of the usual 250MB it gets up to over night. So its a little better with the spyware removed but the problem is still there.

Xaix

 

[nearng24]

I had this problem for a while too. I've found that 9 times out of 10, there's a version of the MSblast worm on your computer, and that causes vsmon.exe to take up a lot of cpu time.

Since Blast and blast variants all replicate themselves by accessing the internet, the firewall is involved. usually, these worms will try to access the internet through dllhost.exe or wintask2.exe or any number of others. The zone alarm window will pop up, asking if this application (i.e. wintask2.exe) may access the internet. if you say yes, which seems like a good idea because it sounds so legitimate, then your internet connection will be bogged down tremendously. If you say no, which you should, because there's no reason for this legitimate program to access the internet, then vsmon.exe will take up more and more cpu time trying to block all the attempts of this thing to access the internet and replicate itself.

Look in the logs of Zone alarm and find out which program is trying to access the internet really frequently (like 30 times a minute) and then look up the information on that application. Chances are you'll be directed to an antivirus site when you google for the name of that application (the one trying to access the internet very frequently) and then you can take steps to remove it.

This is not a problem with Zone Alarm, this is just the result of Zone Alarm doing it's job too well. ZA really is a great program.

 

[CyberCrone]

What a wealth of information on vsmon.exe! I was running Zone Alarm Antivirus and was bogging down more and more, and Outlook became virtually nonfunctional. I looked in Task Manager to see what was taking up all CPU usage and it was vsmon. Didn't have a clue what it is, but an Internet search brought me here. After reading thread I upgraded to ZA Security Suite and so far things are fine. However, before I came here I thought maybe I had been zombied, so I appreciate nearng24's suggestion about looking at logs for possible worm. Will do.

Thanks, all!

Toni McConnel
TechRite Associates
Technical Article Ghostwriting

http://www.TechRite-Associates.com