Performance Counter Failure after a few minutes

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Hi – just found an unusual issue following my upgrade from 1709 to 1803 (I figured after more than a year since 1803 was released, it might actually have the worst issues addressed by now).

I’ve found an odd situation which is interfering with several programs, whereby following a reboot, all is well but after a few minutes (apprx 10 – 15) the windows 10 performance counters stop working.

I then hit an issue in perfmon when trying to add a counter, as none are listed and I just see a rotating cursor icon.

Similarly I use 8Gadgetpack’s Disk Monitoring and Top Process Monitor gadget which also both freeze. I’ve tried uninstalling this and switching to Rainmeter, but that has the same problem, so I’m assuming it’s a counters issue rather than an application bug, especially since on 1709 I had no problems with this at all.

I’ve gone through the usual process of attempting to rebuild the counters using “lodctr /R” on elevated cmd line, in both windows\system32 and windows\syswow64. Both of these report counters successfully rebuilt. I followed this up with “WINMGMT.EXE /RESYNCPERF” to resync counters and a reboot.

Ran sfc /scannow several times too, no errors reported.

Also kept my eye on the services list to see if after the requisite time period, there’s a change to the system which causes the problem, but haven’t been able to spot anything yet.

I can’t imagine I’m the only one to have this problem – can anyone suggest a fix for this? I’m wondering if there’s a period of time during which a service is running, but then after this period, it stops but I’m d***ed if I can see which it might be.

Any help would be appreciated :-).

Thanks,

Marc

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In an elevated command prompt, try running:

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

See if it fixes the problems.

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Thanks PKCano (and Alex5723; thanks also, I appreciate the note on that but I’ve been using these particular system monitors in 8GadgetPack for several years with no problems, and their usefulness exceeds the risk factor. However, your warning is very sensible, and I do take precautions not to install unknown or suspicious gadgets, and keep my antivirus and antimalware software fully up to date with real time monitoring).

PKCano, I’ve followed your suggestion with dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth. This process completed successfully. I rebooted and monitored the system for 18 minutes, at which point the same problem occurred.

In perfmon, I see a chart for processor time (the default counter, which is evidently still running). However, when I click the + to add a new counter, perfmon crashes during the enumeration process and never populates the dialog.

Prior to this 18 minute dead stop, perfmon is running correctly.

Note that system setup is identical to the way I had things under 1709.

(I said it was a strange one ).

Best,

Marc

Edit to remove HTML

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MarcVRML wrote:

I’ve found an odd situation which is interfering with several programs, whereby following a reboot, all is well but after a few minutes (apprx 10 – 15) the windows 10 performance counters stop working.

From Microsoft :

Gadgets are no longer available on our website because the Windows Sidebar platform in Windows 7 has serious vulnerabilities. Microsoft has retired the feature in newer releases of Windows. Gadgets could be exploited to harm your computer, access your computer’s files, show you objectionable content, or change their behavior at any time. An attacker could even use a gadget to take complete control of your PC. If you’re concerned about the safety of gadgets you’ve downloaded, find out more about gadgets and steps you can take to protect your PC.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13787/gadgets-have-been-discontinued

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Hi – I have a little extra information on this : I followed the instructions at https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/196/Q196712/ which describe how to manually disable each DLL loaded up into perfmon.

The idea is to see if perfmon still works ok without them, and then progressively re-enable to determine which dll is causing the problem.

I have identified that a dll called “Bitsperf.dll” is the faulting item.

My version of bitsperf.dll has the following characteristics:

Date: 12/04/2018 00:34

Size: 29,696 bytes

Size on disk: 32,768 bytes

Product version : 7.8.17134.1

Further ideas on this?

Best,

Marc

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OK, in case this helps anyone else in similar circumstances, I’ve been able to remove the bottleneck (at least, so far observed and for the last 70 minutes all has been well, which is far longer than I’ve seen things working previously).

I’ll explain how, as your cause may be different to mine, but having identified that bitsperf.dll was faulting, I determined that a full rebuild of the WMI repository was required, and found this set of instructions: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-repair-or-rebuild-the-wmi-repository-on-windows-10

Part of this process involved what to do if the reset failed, and the advice was to stop all dependent services using the command: net stop winmgmt /y

In my case, this command also failed, but the failure code reported which services were in a state where they couldn’t be stopped. The first was IP Service, and the second – interestingly – was my anti malware software, Malwarebytes Premium.

I uninstalled Malwarebytes, rebooted, and then went through the WMI rebuild process as described in the page above.

Once that was done with, I rebooted again, waited 30 minutes to confirm the fault was no longer present, and then I re-installed Malwarebytes.

That was over an hour ago, and so far, so good. I suspect whatever needed repairing as an aspect of the various suggestions I’ve received was being blocked (silently) by Malwarebytes at a very low level.

I should have looked at my antivirus and anti malware earlier of course, but with everything else apparently behaving correctly, I had a blind spot in that direction.

I hope this helps others, and thanks again to PKCano for the assistance in pointing me in the right direction.

Best,

Marc

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