Argh! Vista and taskeng.exe

[Ilwrath]

I'm typically not a Microsoft basher (in fact, Microsoft has made me a lot of money over the years...) but in this case, I agree that the best advice I've seen is to try to get yourself a copy of XP.  

I typically support servers and networks, but I get asked about workstations quite a bit, so I decided it would be in my best interests to "upgrade" to Vista and get more experience so I could support my customers better.  So when it came up time to refresh my own workstation, off to Vista it went.  EGADS!  I won't bore you folks with the 3+ pages of serious issues I discovered with this OS, but the short is that two months later (and a week or two after applying the official SP1 I downloaded from Microsoft.com myself) I finally threw in the towel and pulled out my XP CD and installed that.  

Now, all that being said, here's what I've learned if you must stay at Vista...

First, as already stated, apply SP1 if you haven't already.

Second, Vista is VERY sensitive about drivers.  I'd check your motherboard vendor for any updated chipset drivers.  Letting Windows Update install your drivers is typically a bad idea for your stability and sanity.  Update drivers AFTER applying SP1, because if you do it before, SP1 will randomly revert your drivers back to whatever version it feels like.  Just one of the many "fun experiences" I "enjoyed" about my Vista adventure.

After that, I'd start looking into specific cases involving that file.  I'm not sure what else you've tried, but after about 10 seconds of Google, I found the following MS Technet thread.

HTH

[Ilwrath]

Certainly, checking over your services and never letting anything that isn't running be set to Automatic is basic administration.  In fact, the Technet thread I linked to was saying, unless you need the Task Scheduler it can be turned off.  

But, since two copies of it are running on his system, I'm assuming he needs it for something.  Being a "scheduler" I'm assuming it probably is looking to the chipset APIs to find timing information.  Updating the chipset drivers seems like a good idea, as they may be causing other problems you haven't seen, yet.

Also, Vista's reliability monitor would be a great feature, if it worked.  Of course, it doesn't, though.  It sees "WHQL Certification" as the most likely candidate for it's random spew of messages.  Never mind the fact that the last WHQL driver is more than a year out of date, and designed for a product family that has less features than the device you own.  

Vista's driver choosing algorithms kept insisting that the "best" version of my sound drivers were over 100 revisions out of date and did not support more than 2 channels.  I'm sorry.  I kind of LIKE surround sound.  I only had this feature working correctly for the past 3 years in XP.  This oversight might be more understandable if I had a rare audio chipset or something.  But my workstation runs one of the world's most popular audio chips, the Realtek AC'97.  Gah!

And don't even get me started on the moronic "reliability monitor".  That thing started spewing advice after a system halt.  The system halt was quite clearly my fault, and was caused by me trying to force an install of an XP game that didn't quite like UAC very much.  Vista's reliability monitor concluded that my HP Photosmart printer driver caused the crash!  How silly of me to blame the old game I launched moments earlier!  It's clearly the driver for a printer (that was currently off) which is causing all the problems.  (slaps forehead)

And again, I don't mean to make this into a diatribe, but I've got a lot more stories like these.  There are a good number of other people who are quite versed on the current Microsoft Way that hate Vista just as much as I do.