ielowutil.exe mystery solved

[Dieselman]

Here is a helpful hint I discovered myself so I thought I share it with you.

After installing IE 9 and using it for about a week I went back to Firefox 3.5.6. then eventually to FF 4.0. So I never went back to IE ever again. But for some odd reason ielowutil.exe would magically appear. I didn't think much of it at first. So one day I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. I opened up my trusty Process Hacker and explored everything about ielowutil.exe. The parent program of course is IE. But the fact that I never opened IE made it even more odd. So I did some research for about an hour and came up with nothing.

So I went into Process Hackers settings and enabled all the system tray features which basically tells you who started who,when and where. I sat and watch my laptop for about an hour at idle. When ielowutil.exe started it was triggered by Feeds and Web Slices. I was like .............."What?". So I went into internet options\content\feeds and web slices\settings. In there I unchecked "automatically check feeds and web slices for updates". I also unchecked everything else in there.

Presto................Problem gone. So exactly what was going on? Well it turns out that ielowutil.exe is a prefetcher for feeds and web slices. That was about 2 weeks ago and ielowutil.exe has never mysteriously appeared on its own again. Hope this helps some members and also you can learn how Process Hacker can be used as a diagnostic tool.

Jack edited 10-09-2012 12:35 PM this post because: How to disable ielowutil.exe from starting on Internet Explorer. 1.Start Internet Explorer,click on the Gear icon and then select "Internet Options" 2.Click on the Content tab and then Feed and Web Slices field select Settings. 3.In the Feed and Web Slices window,uncheck all the boxes.Click OK and then Apply 4.Restart your browser.

[MrXidus]

Thanks for the information Dieselman.

[Dieselman]

The best news comes from within. Your welcome.

[McLovin]

Nice information Dman, Thanks

[Dieselman]

Let me know if anyone else has experienced this.

[jamescv7]

Well as I often use IE9 on the laptop seems I didn't notice that processes if that comes there I will not bothered it.

[Earth]

(04-22-2011 02:57 AM)Dieselman wrote:  Let me know if anyone else has experienced this.

Yeah, a few weeks back.

[Dieselman]

(04-22-2011 09:12 AM)jamescv7 wrote:  Well as I often use IE9 on the laptop seems I didn't notice that processes if that comes there I will not bothered it.

Most likely cause your on XP. But you dont have to be using IE James as I already said. How did you run IE 9 on XP anyways?

[Earth]

James, if I remember correctly the Laptop runs Windows 7 and the Desktop run Windows XP?

[bogdan]

As far as i know ielowutil.exe was introduced in IE8 to better handle low integrity level operations in IE. It is needed because of the IE Protected mode security feature. So the process itself is not directly related to news feeds but since IE starts to update those feeds, this process might be also started. So the problem is that IE starts because of the Automatically check for Feeds and Webslices is enabled (but I think this is not enabled by default), you obviously don't need this feature if IE is not your main browser.

An article about ielowutil.exe: link.