lsass.exe and csrss.exe causing constant hard drive usage

[Man_With_Beard]

Hello. I've got a very strange problem on my hands here. I recently upgraded my case and to go with my new case I got a SATA Sony DRU-190S DVD-writer to replace my IDE writer. After completing the transfer to my new case I noticed that my hard drive light was flickering every second. It was pretty noticable as the Antec 900 HD light is very bright.

Upon investigating further I noticed that lsass.exe and csrss.exe were constantly producing many I/O reads and writes to the hard drive. After googling lsass.exe and csrss.exe I discovered that these two processes have caused other Windows users to experience the same problem, but every cause seems different e.g. A virus, CPU utilization issue, corrupt profile etc. and I couldn't find one that matched mine.

I managed to find a thread that mentioned a Microsoft service called Terminal Service, which I disabled, and that seemed to tame lsass.exe. The problem is csrss.exe remains and is reading the hard drive many times an hour causing the hard drive to flicker every second.

I found a thread that told me to use Disk Monitor and Process Monitor together to try and capture what exactly is accessing the hard drive. Unfortunately I couldn't get Process Monitor to work it just came up with an error 'unable to allocate memory with a block size 4000', I tried googling that error but found nothing that could fix Process Monitor. I tried using filemon and process explorer, but its not really giving me the information that I need and I don't really know how to use them properly.

I've used KAV7, Ccleaner, Spybot, Ad-aware, Spyware Terminator - All came back clean. I even cleaned out my nvidia drivers and reinstalled them - still the same. Unfortunately the solution seems to evade those that it afflicts and a fix is usually never found according to the threads I've read.

I'm going to try and disconnect the SATA optical drive and try my old IDE optical drive. The reason is someone on CD Freaks forum had the exact same problem as me about a year ago. Installed a Sony Optiarc SATA Optical drive and this problem started to affect him in the same way as it is affecting me now.

In the end he couldn't find the problem so I'm not too happy at this moment.

So I'm still stuck as to what to do next. I'm going to try and repair my XP installation, failing that I will try a clean installation using first my SATA writer and then if that fails revert back to my IDE writer and see if that makes a difference.

I'm on windows XP SP3.

Has anyone suffered anything similar?

[drmsucks]

Hello. I've got a very strange problem on my hands here. I recently upgraded my case and to go with my new case I got a SATA Sony DRU-190S DVD-writer to replace my IDE writer. After completing the transfer to my new case I noticed that my hard drive light was flickering every second. It was pretty noticable as the Antec 900 HD light is very bright.

Did you have this problem in your 'old case?'

I'm a literal reader! Does this mean that the only hardware change was the external case and the Sony DVD, i.e., you put the old motherboard, video, harddrive, etc, into the new case? What about power supply?

Is this computer on a network?

Does the computer exhibit any 'problems' - slowness, etc.

Have you tried to create a new user profile per the MS article that you referenced? (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555021)

Have you verified that the only copies of the two files are in C:\Windows\System32?

The more info that we have the better chance of finding a solution.

[Broni]

Also, try to install Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
It'll show you sub-processes of csrss.exe