Anyone that has implemented NAP knows its not that difficult. Its much easier than it used to be to get IAS setup to support 802.1x network authentication, and it does health checks on the systems to make sure they are configured correctly. Now that sounds great, but its not so great when those health checks cause 50% of your desktops to spike 100% CPU usage for 3-7 minuets. That makes your users very unhappy.
Our users have never been happy with how slow the WAN is. Things got more vocal after we implemented NAP, and according to the network monitoring software the bandwidth was fine. Also every time we checked the PCs they would be running fine.
Well after a while someone finally noticed that the slowdown was happening right when the Offline Health Checks were running, and they always ran around the same time on these effected systems. So we watched one, and sure enough svchost.exe spiked to 100% for around 5 minuets.
Ok thats not helpful at all because tons of stuff runs under svchost.exe. So I download process explorer and launched it. We left it running on one of the effected PCs until it happened again about 60 minuets later.
So now we know what svchost.exe process was causing the issue, but sure enough this particular svchost.exe had all kinds of stuff running in it so we opened the "Threads" tab of this particular svchost.exe process, and waited for it again.
Finally identified the particular thread, and its associated file as wuaueng.dll. Well thats just the Windows Update service. So we checked its version 7.1.x.x, and compared it to a system that works fine, and it was 7.2.x.x oh look at that.
So I found this update http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949104, and after installing it on all the "slow" PCs they work fine.
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