agent.exe and ISUSPM.exe are taking over my machine

Today I was doing some coding and getting intermittent performance.  When I looked there was a program called agent.exe that was hogging all my resources.  When I killed it, it was using 50-75% of CPU and 600M of memory.   When I killed it, it auto-started and continues to suck memory, but not as bad on memory.

I started up the latest version of Sysinternals Process Monitor and It turns out that the agent.exe program and ISUSPM.exe program are actually the Macromedia Software Manager Agent.  According to a couple of the process sites like BleepingComputer and File Net

You can actually run the Software Manager directly from the Start->All Programs->Software Updates, it’s the water drop icon.  In running that, it turns out that it was the Intermec IDL Device Resources Kit, that installed the agent to let me know about their updates.

Regardless, I’m not interested in random programs sucking down resources on my computer.  Although, it seems reasonable to do the updates on demand.

To find the startup program its a lot easier to run the System Configuration Utility, msconfig.exe from Start->Run and disable it on the Startup tab.

You can test it this way, but to permanently remove the program from the system startup you need to delete the actual registry key:

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ISUSPM

Now I can run System Updates if I feel like, but it won’t run when I don’t want it.  Now things are running back where they should be.