Does XP Help Center phone home?

[John Marsh]

Left the laptop idle; found it with CPU at 100% and HDD busy. Opened up Process Explorer; found the Help Center service had started up and was very active. I hadn't used the Help Center all day.

Was it talking to Microsoft HQ? There's no entry for auto-updating in its options.

I found an updates log in the relevant folder on C. Last one was in 2004.

Any ideas?

[Sallyann1234]

You can check which components of Windows call home with your firewall (you DO have a firewall?). Just set it to ask on all applications and system services - it will tell you straight away when anything tries to call out.

[John Marsh]

Thanks Sallyann1234.

I use Comodo Firewall Pro. I've set it to block any call out attempts by the Help Center service.