Diskeeper 2007 - svchost.exe performance issue

Yesterday I had to diagnose a performance issue with a Laptop. The machine in question is running Windows XP, fully patched and up to date, I ran a chkdsk, full disk virus and malware using Kaspersky scan (additional to the real time virus scanner installed). I left the machine and later in the day I came back .to have a look. All the scans had come back clean so I rebooted and noticed how slow things were to load, I checked task manager when I had finally logged in. I noticed that there was a svchost.exe process using 40MB of memory and sitting at 100% cpu all the time.

After quickly checking through the programs run at startup and stopping them, I worked my way onto the services. The only non-default service was Diskeeper 2007. I tried to stop this service but the system hung for a while. The service was stuck stopping. I Rebooted into safe mode and tried reinstalling Diskeeper 2007. After reboot the performance issue was still there. I went back into safe mode and uninstalled Diskeeper 2007 and then on reboot the machine was back to its original speed.

I did not have time to investigate the specific issue. This is annoying I as I did recommended Diskeeper 2007, the owner of this machine is not willing to upgrade to Diskeeper 2008 (partly cost, partly due to this issue).

Due to this machine used for music recording purposes frequently by Angel of Sin , it suffers far higher than normal office use fragmentation. The built in defragmentation tool fails to keep fragmentation under control (not helped by the 40GB HDD regularly getting filled).

The best alternative is PerfectDisk 2008, I hope to do some extensive testing this month, so maybe PerfectDisk 2008 will get my recommendation. In the mean time I have suggested using JKDefrag, which performs far better than the built in XP defragmentation tool.