My little EEE PC 1000HE is struggling. Its fan is whirring, blowing hot air out. Something is making it work. Initially, I suspected FireFox as that has been a bit of a hog of late–but typically that is a memory muncher.

A quick glance at the task manager, sorting on CPU utilization showed PresentationFontCache.exe That’s a suspect name if I ever saw one.

Some research reveals that (typical) it is a legitimate Microsoft bit of code, seemingly associated with the .NET framework.

Why it feels the need to consume 50% of my CPU to cache fonts…well, I guess that’s just Microsoft.

Some indication that it is a bug with the .NET 3.0 framework. I am trying the update to 3.5 now.

We’ll see how it goes.

[Update]

After the .NET 3.5 SP 1 upgrade, PresentationFontCache.exe is back to being a good process and not a hog.

[Update]

Continuing to dig into Firefox resource utilization, I see the following plugin hiding there.  Hrmm… bears further investigation.