My PC has been taking an increasingly longer time to boot over the past few weeks to the point yesterday where it sat at the loading screen for nearly an hour. So there followed several hours of running CHKDSK /R in the recovery console and making sure that everything was fine and it was, or so I thought.

This morning I turn on GN-01 and, again, she takes a good twenty minutes to boot up. So I check the eventvwr and what do I see? Two weird entries, one for {F4524160-9145-49C9-8810-46CBC1EA0021} and one for KService.exe which has failed to load several times over. So I search the registry and discover that they are the same thing. I don’t recognise the name or the self-named directory it is sitting in. It isn’t in my Add/Remove Programs listing and I don’t recognise publisher, Kontiki, listed in the apps properties.

Like all good geeks I hit Google and what do I find? It’s peer-to-peer sharing service which most consider malware and Sky Anytime has apparantly installed it. As the Sky service is more than a little bit poo, I decided to uninstall it and see if that resolved the problem. Windows uninstalled the Sky Anytime application but not the KService itself, so with a bit more searching I found some references to KClean.exe at PC Doctor (where I downloaded a copy), the Sky website & AskJack at the Guardian and used that to clean up after KService, followed up with ensuring that it was gone by following the the manual instructions on Geoff’s Blog and checking references to the CLSID and KService.exe itself in my registry. The only thing that hadn’t been changed was the Service actually disabled, it was still set to Automatic, and the files deleted. Those done I rebooted to see what would happen and after several hours of chkdsk running again, boot-up time has once again been reduced to one minute or less.