The other day I opened my laptop and woke it up form sleep to find that it was running a little sluggish. When I opened task manager I found that the taskeng.exe application had over 900 entries in the process list. I tried killing them but they continued to startup. Clearly something was amiss.

I'm running Vista so getting to the task scheduler is pretty easy, just hit the windows key and start typing task... Once I got into the task scheduler I still could not see anything wrong. Going into Task Scheduler Library showed only one task and it was not running.

I had to click on the view action item in the right pane and select Show Hidden Tasks and there it was. It was the RSS synchronization task that was the culprit. Apparently it kept failing when it was starting up (I could see this in the history tab). Now that I had found what the problem was, I was at a bit of a lose as to how to fix it.

Doing some searching revealed this post by Karl Foley. It was about vista 64 but it sounded like the same problem. Following his advice I was able to get everything back to normal.  I also learned about a new application - msfeedssync - I didn't realize this existed nor did I know that it was responsible for getting my RSS feeds in IE. I tried to find any help on this application but I came up empty.

BTW - I was able to easily kill all those runaway taskeng processes by using Powershell and the stop-process command.