# Adobe Desktop Service.EXE High & Continuous I/O Reads/Writes



## Paul_DS256 (Sep 28, 2019)

I occasionally have slow downs on my Windows 7. I have a USB based monitor extender that sometimes misbehaves and forces a reboot.

I just discovered that Abobe Desktop Service.EXE has more I/O Reads than my Malware Service. The counters for reads and writes are always incrementing.  It has the highest I/O reads for any process.

Can anyone explain what is happening and if this is normal?

Thanks


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 30, 2019)

What were you doing in Lightroom at the time?


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## Paul_DS256 (Sep 30, 2019)

LR wasn't even open Victoria.

I made an adjustment and removed the option for Creative Cloud NOT to start at login, but Desktop.EXE still starts.

I just booted about an hour ago and Desktop.EXE is already the highest I/O read at over 160K. My concern is not so much that it's running but what is it doing with all those reads


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 2, 2019)

Ah, I missed that it was a generic Adobe exe and not a Lightroom one. Odd!


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 2, 2019)

Pretty sure that's the service that has crashed a couple of times on my Mac in recent wekks (with no apparent ill effects!). Bug in the software which reacts differently on Mac versus Windows?


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## Paul_DS256 (Oct 2, 2019)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Ah, I missed that it was a generic Adobe exe and not a Lightroom one. Odd!


And I missed as well Victoria so I apologize for posting a non-LR query. I'll chase down other forums.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Oct 5, 2019)

I've had some of the (WAY WAY TOO MANY) Adobe processes seem to run amok.  When I research I find lots of people complaining but rarely resolution, though once in a while Adobe has patched and fixed a problem.  Sadly (or happily depending on viewpoint) you appear to be on the latest.

I think to find out the cause you probably need to figure out what it is doing.  That's both easy and quite hard.  If you are technically inclined you might look at either Process Monitor or Process Explorer, both available here.   Note I've never used their cloud versions, but the software is generally safe but not exactly for beginners.  However, they will show you exactly what files are in use (if I recall Process Monitor is the best in that regard, and filter for the executable name).  Whether this helps or not depends on what the I/O is.  If it's something like a monitor, very high I/O count is not abnormal.  If it's disk or network it might give you a feel for what it is doing (e.g. file or directory names) which might or might not ring a bell with you.

You can try calling Adobe but for something like this I wouldn't recommend it.   You can post in the Adobe forums but will also likely need more details to get anywhere.


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## Paul_DS256 (Oct 5, 2019)

I hear you Ferguson. Tracing the process to the open files is something on a low priority for me. I have discovered I can kill DESKTOP.EXE without any effects.

I also found a reference to potential problems with older versions. For some reason I had a copy of Elements 10 installed. The uninstall was gone so I had to do a manual delete. Only thing left to do is remove the hive entries which always makes me nervous.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Oct 6, 2019)

Paul_DS256 said:


> I also found a reference to potential problems with older versions. For some reason I had a copy of Elements 10 installed. The uninstall was gone so I had to do a manual delete. Only thing left to do is remove the hive entries which always makes me nervous.


I've never used elements, but in similar circumstances I've often found it useful to re-install the product entirely, then un-install normally. 

There's also a cleaner tool though not sure if it works for elements 10 or not (also never used it): 

Use the CC Cleaner Tool for installation issues


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