Windows maintenance making PC unusable

Hi - I hope someone can help.

For some time, I have had a problem with Windows 8 maintenance. After maintenance starts (flag icon), the CPU load goes to 100%, and it is very difficult to get the PC to respond. Even the mouse pointer is sluggish. Clicking the mouse gets rid of the maintenance icon, but the CPU load stays at 100%. The culprit usually (but not always) appears to be WMI provider host using 35% of the CPU.

Using task manager, I can eventually end the WMI task, and after a while the CPU load drops. This can take several minutes, but the problem will then happen again if I leave the PC idle for a while. Maintenance is set to start at 3 am but the PC is not left on overnight, so the problem happens after I switch on.

I have recently installed Windows 8.1 (previously Win 8), hoping that this update would cure the problem, but it has made no difference. Disabling maintenance in task scheduler prevents the problem, but only until I reboot.

The PC is an unmodified Lenovo desktop, i5-2320 with 8GB RAM, Windows defender factory installed, standard hard drive.

Can anybody suggest a reason for this?

I never run Maintenance, because I have all of the things that Maintenance does already scheduled to occur through various programs. You really don't need to run it all the time either, once a month will do nicely, in the interim your Actin Center will notify you of any problems that need to be dealt with.

But if you are gonna use it, you can probably schedule it to run while you are sleeping. If you can't schedule it like that, then I would suggest, never turn it on until you go to bed or step out of your office/house for a while.

Thanks - I will try changing regular maintenance to monthly, although I think the problem may be caused by idle maintenance, which doesn't appear to have much in the way of trigger options.

Try this link.....I've done this and I've not had the maintenance program run since. I also disabled Idel Maintenance, maintenance config as well as regular maintenance.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/34374-automatic-maintenance-enable-disable-windows-8-a.html

Ah good, try that.

I vaguely remember having this issue with Windows 7, finally disabled it.

I changed regular maintenance to a monthly trigger yesterday, but today it was back to daily.

I have also (several times) disabled idle maintenance and regular maintenance, (using the method shown in the link posted above by bassfisher) but in each case the task is re-enabled next time the PC is switched on. I have seen posts on other forums which suggest that maintenance in Windows 8 cannot be disabled permanently, so I am beginning to run out of ideas.

However I have now tried another method, as well as disabling the task, I have disabled the trigger itself (by right clicking the task, then properties - triggers - edit - uncheck "enabled" box.

I can do this for idle and regular maintenance, but I am unable to change any of the settings for the maintenance configurator - I get error "The user account you are using does not have permission to disable this task". (I am the only user account on this PC).

Will find out tomorrow if this has worked, although I have a feeling that it is the configurator which re-enables the tasks.