This is a bit of a confused situation because it only happened on one lab machine (Acer 4810T) that has just been upgraded from Vista + LDMS 9.0 SP2 to Win7-32 + LDMS 9.0 SP4. There were two seemingly unrelated problems after the upgrade: -1- the machine was generally sluggish, particularly in the first few minutes after reboot. CPU usage was at or close to 100% for 3 or 4 minutes and softmon was the main culprit. Even after this time, the machine remained sluggish. -2- the machine would not wake up from sleep mode. You would close and reopen the lid (or wait for the inactivity timeout) and nothing (except a hard reset, i.e. holding the power button) would bring the machine back to life.
I reduced the agent to a bare minimum, with software monitoring disabled (left AV though, but no other endpoint security). Made no difference. Next I went for something more drastic and disabled the softmon service. I wasn't too surprised to find that the sluggishness was gone. But the sleep mode problem was gone as well and that was a bit of a surprise...
Anyone seen similar behaviour?