About a week ago I downloaded and installed one Racing game demo, because I wanted to see how my son will do with it (if he’s going to like it or not).

Unfortunately after installing the demo, it started to throw nice BSODs on my machine. Something was wrong. A quick check revealed the reason – my NVidia driver was way too old and obviously needed upgrade.

I downloaded and installed the latest NVidia driver, version 2.11.15.0. Everything worked with a charm. Angel really liked the game, and it shortly become his favorite. I will have to buy it now, but this is for another post ;).

However, today I observed very nasty behavior of my machine. It seems something was really bugging its performance. Each minute the machine was freezing for about 30 seconds! Everything seemed to stop, including its network adapter (it stopped accepting ping requests too).
After these 30 seconds the machine was resuming its normal operation, till the next freeze (which was occuring in maximum of 5 minutes).

I was pissed off! I was suspecting the newest hardware/driver change, and that obviously was the NVidia driver installation. I was even more pissed when I found proof of my suspicion in my System Event Log. Each time when a new hang occurs, my SCM (Service Control Manager) was issuing the following message:

> Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the NVSvc service.

For those of you who do not know, NVSvc happens to be the NVIDIA Driver Helper Service, part of the latest driver update I made.

Now I had two oportunities:

* Either I remove the NVidia driver, and BSOD returns, making the game unplayable and disappointing a lot my little son;
* Either I look for a solution.

Google didn’t help at all. It seems people had similar problems, but no good solution was provided whatsoever..

So I decided to try the last resort. I disabled the NVidia service, and restarted the machine, expecting the worst, i.e. – unability to boot except in Safe Mode (where the NVidia driver would not be used).
Fortunately, so far I had no problems at all. The system rebooted normally, and I was able to login and work with no side effects (again – so far).

No more nasty hangs, no more event log messages. This disgusting service has gone away, making my system usable again.

It seems this is the solution. If I have any problem because of this solution, I will update this article.

Short quote here: if you experience problems connected with nvsvc.exe, please be sure you will check first this article about W32/Agobot-EL troyan, which represents itself as nvsvc.exe service! Although my problem was not connected with this, it’s quite possible you to have this troyan running there!

Have fun!