Just recently, I have noticed my Windows XP laptop’s fan buzzing like crazy. As I checked the Task Manager to see what process was utilizing the CPU cycles so much, I noticed a process called "cscript.exe" using about 50%. Then I saw another instance of the cscript executable. I was totally dumbfounded and did not know what the heck this script was doing. Was it malware? a virus? who knows?

Instantly, I began to google and bing the term, cscript. It seemed like a harmless file. From the microsoft.com site,

“Cscript.exe is a command-line version of the Windows Script Host that provides command-line options for setting script properties”.

So why was this harmless file taking up so much freaking cpu power? There seemed to be numerous causes and solutions based on my Google findings.

Once the *bleeping* computer-hogging script was running, I used my Windows cmd window to list out all the tasks and processes running. I wasn’t sure how to find the source of the cscript startup. So, at one point, I decided to kill the process using a "/T" switch parameter in the command, ie. taskkill /PID 3124 /T.  This command killed the cscript process as well as another process.  The “/T” parameter runs a tree kill – It terminates the specified process as well as any processes that were started by it. By doing so, it killed a process that was affiliated to a process called "WZCSLDR2", which lived in the "Program Files/ANI/".

I quickly Googled this "ANI" term and noticed some references to wireless adapters. Suddently, I recalled that I didnt notice the whirling fan noise until I installed a USB wireless adapter (In this case, it was the DLink Wireless 150 USB Adapter DWA-125).  So, after uninstalling the DLink software, my computer was mine again! Thank goodness…

I probably didnt have to uninstall the software; I just needed to remove it from the StartUp items using the System Configuration Utility (type Run > msconfig). But I was too peeved! I wanted it off my machine.  Happy days are here again!