Livecomm.exe using 10% of my cpu and constantly downloading something

nearyetsofaraway

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Jan 22, 2013
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It seems that when I have the Mail app open in Windows 8, task manager tells me that 'Communications Service' (also known as livecomm.exe), uses up a constant 10% of my i7 3770k processor. Way too much usage for an idling email app. I don't know when this started happening, but it has not always been doing this. The service also seems to be downloading/uploading something constantly. It used up 3GB yesterday in three hours just sitting there downloading something in the background. This is really carling me off. I don't have hours to waste on the phone or chatting with their tech support, and Microsoft has removed email support. Somehow I doubt they would understand the problem anyway. Anyone else having problems?

Update: problem remains after closing all metro apps. Only fix is to force quit livecomm.exe . Reopening Mail starts the process all over again. Mail is a very useful app and I want to be able to take advantage of it without it hogging my resources for no reason.
 

kyllien

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Jan 22, 2013
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I may be syncing all your old emails. Go to settings (charm) then accounts then select the email account you want to check. There are quite a few option to check and customize how you receive your mail. Mine took a few days to download all my email.
 

nearyetsofaraway

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Jan 22, 2013
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Nope :( I have all my accounts set to download mail only from the last 2 weeks. When I am actually using the mail app, 'Mail' appears under task manager and uses an expected conservative amount of CPU and bandwidth. However, 'Communications Service' is still there at 10% (average) CPU usage and 2.0 Mbps (average) network usage. Killing 'Communications Service' makes the Mail not work. I think it must be some kind of bug in their software. I found another forum where the only 'solution' was to delete the app. I guess I'll have to wait for Microsoft to put out an update...

Do you think you can check out 'Communications Service' under your task manager and see what it's doing? I never would have noticed the problem if I hadn't had it open for another reason.
 
on my system: communication service is %0 cpu. 6.6mb memory 0 %disk and 0 % network IO.
It looks like a metro app, in the task manager details it shows as suspended while I am on the desktop so the values I see for the task sound like what I would expect.

I would find the process id (pid) for the service then start resource manager and look at the disk activity for that PID to find out what file it is writing to. Just to make sure it is not making a offline cache of some large online email folder.

you might have another metro ui app the is interfering with the livecomm.exe app. (using the same limited resource) I would close any other running metro app and see if you livecomm.exe actually does complete its task.
(just a guess)

- maybe uninstall the app and reinstall it?
- set up another email account and see if it has the same problem
(to help isolate it to the local machine or is it the account that is causing the issue)
- I have seen bugs in network Ethernet drivers that result in a download that never completes. basically, the driver drops the data packet because of a bug, the TCPIP transport requests a resend of the packet from the server, the Ethernet driver drops the packet again, the TCPIP transport request a resend... a nice endless loop. Only fix was a updated Ethernet driver for your machine. Only way to figure out the cause of the problem was to put a network sniffer on the network and look at the network traffic.

Best to just try to find a update driver for you machine and hope.
 

nearyetsofaraway

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Jan 22, 2013
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Hmm. I rebooted my machine and it is working normally again. It has come back before after reboots so I will have to do some investigation to see what makes it come on.

-It happened before even with all metro apps closed.

All my drivers are current as I was recently forced to do a complete re-install by a Microsoft tech for a different problem (didn't fix that either), and I got all the newest ones. This was about a 2 weeks ago.

I'll try the PID lookup and a re-install of the apps after it comes back again. I'm guessing this is some kind of obscure Microsoft bug.