spoolsv.exe at 99% CPU usage

My friend called me few days back and he told that his PC is acting very slowly. To me, first it looked like a case of my newbie friend not regularly cleaning his PC with spy or virus removal tools.I checked his PC with Spybot S&D with latest spy definitions , and also check for any virus’s with Norton Anti virus. But still the Pc was lagging. Then I ran the Windows Task Manager and checked which program was using up all the Cpu resource. Fascinatingly a executable named spoolsv.exe was using up 99% of all the resources and wasn’t eager to go down. I even tried to kill the spoolsv.exe process manually, but after a few seconds it again automatically ran in the background and started hogging the CPU.

First look at the exe name, says it has something to do with the printer spool. I looked up at the internet about spoolsv.exe and it’s not a virus anyways, spoolsv.exe is the spooler service responsible for managing spooled print/fax jobs. After a while, I manage to find a way to solve the spoolsv.exe from shooting up to 99% cpu usage problem.

It is advised to turn on the Print Spooler service first. You can do it from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Look for Print Spooler and stop it.

If it is already stopped, just follow the next step.
Delete ALL files in C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS. It should have files something like 00020.SHD, 00020.SPL and etc…
Now spoolsv.exe should run but it’s at 0% CPU usage. Nice fix discovered.