<story><title>How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work</title><url>https://nuxx.net/blog/2022/12/23/how-asus-and-a-microsoft-bug-almost-broke-remote-work/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ytygg775</author><text>Clickbaity title. It makes it sound like remote work for everybody everywhere almost broke because of this-or-that thing involving Microsoft and Asus. Not the case. The article is about some obscure issue for a particular company who trusted their IT to be handled by Active Directory in a Microsoft Azure cloud environment, involving Asus home routers. Hardly a general insight.&lt;p&gt;The root cause for this is the inability of our industry to properly define standards and then enforcing&amp;#x2F;sticking to them. Everybody just hacks something that kinda-sorta works and whoever has the larger market share is right and everybody else has to suffer, even if they themselves want to do the right thing and do it properly.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s face it, we all suck at this and have to pay for it with this kind of meaningless waste of time &amp;quot;troubleshooting&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Asus and a Microsoft Bug Almost Broke Remote Work</title><url>https://nuxx.net/blog/2022/12/23/how-asus-and-a-microsoft-bug-almost-broke-remote-work/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PreInternet01</author><text>Ah, yes, my old nemesis, WinHttpAutoProxySvc... For years, on both Windows 10 and 11, this has had the habit of randomly spiking the CPU core the service is running on to 100%, in some kind of busy-loop that&amp;#x27;s effectively preventing anything that uses the Win32 HTTP API from working.&lt;p&gt;So, if symptoms include &lt;i&gt;laptop fan thinks it&amp;#x27;s a jet engine&lt;/i&gt;, Start menu refusing to fully populate, Search not responding, and a lot of apps just not launching at all (or taking several minutes to do so), a quick look at the Services tab in Task Manager for WinHttpAutoProxySvc, followed by &lt;i&gt;go to details&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;End task&lt;/i&gt; on the corresponding svchost.exe might just do the trick. You can ignore the big scary warning about this restarting the system: that&amp;#x27;s a lie.&lt;p&gt;For a slightly more permanent fix, paste the following into a .reg file and merge it into your Registry:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WinHttpAutoProxySvc]
    &amp;quot;Start&amp;quot;=dword:00000004
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This will disable the service (which Microsoft has made impossible to do via regular GUI or CLI tooling), and after a reboot, you should be able to, like, use your PC for a while. Keep an eye open for rogue Windows Updates, though, as Microsoft really, really wants to re-enable this service using those. (Apparently, WinHttpAutoProxySvc does &lt;i&gt;all kinds of important stuff&lt;/i&gt;, including address assignment for non-native IPv6 setups, none of which I care about, but before blindly following &amp;#x27;just disable this thing&amp;#x27; advice from the Internet, just &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; for a while before rolling it out to your entire fleet).&lt;p&gt;Playing whack-a-mole with WinHttpAutoProxySvc has been oddly satisfying so far: one of these days I might actually grab a debugger to see what&amp;#x27;s going on here (because, yes, also after updating to Windows 11 22H2, which re-enabled the service, I had the same-old symptoms within days -- I admire the writer of this article for getting a fix for their problem that &lt;i&gt;worked&lt;/i&gt;!)</text></comment>