logged into one of our servers this morning and found svchost process eating 90+ % of CPU. dug a littel deeper with Process Explorer and found that it was the wuaueng.dll that was the culprit. after googling, found the following URL: http://ask-leo.com/c011472.html

Thanks to Leo for his posting. Here's the text of one possible resolution from the link above:

1. Click Start, click Run, and then type net stop wuauserv .
2. On the desktop, double-click My Computer, and then delete the drive :\WuTemp folder.
3. Delete the drive:\Windows \System32\Catroot2 folder.
4. Open the drive:\Windows folder, and then rename the SoftwareDistribution folder as SoftwareDistributionOLD.
5. Open the drive:\Windows \system32 folder, and then follow these steps:
a. Rename the Wuweb.dll file as Wuweb.dll.old.
b. Rename the Wuapi.dll file as Wuapi.dll.old.
c. Rename the Wuauclt.exe file as Wuauclt.exe.old.
d. Rename the Wuaucpl.cpl file as Wuaucpl.cpl.old.
e. Rename the Wuaueng1.dll file as Wuaueng1.dll.old.
f. Rename the Wuaueng.dll file as Wuaueng.dll.old.
g. Rename the Wuauserv.dll file as Wuauserv.dll.old.
h. Rename the Wucltui.dll file as Wucltui.dll.old.
i. Rename the Wups2.dll file as Wups2.dll.old.
j. Rename the Wups.dll file as Wups.dll.old.
6. Restart the computer.

Strangely though, just as i was getting ready to implement Leo's fix, svchost CPU utilization dropped back do to zero. not sure what's happening, but i will be monitoring as the day goes on....