DWM.exe stuck at 10-12% cpu, causing stuttering

Can't find a solution to this. There are occurrences where dwm.exe will start using 10-12% of cpu and cause stuttering when trying to do anything. Most common occurrence is after a program crashes, but has happened randomly at other times. When it happens, only recourse is to reboot. In the past, it only happens once a week. Annoying, but I dealt with it. Lately, getting more and more frequent. Happened 3 times in an hour this past weekend and is becoming a daily occurrence.

Video drivers up to date. Tried a fresh reinstall of video drivers. Tried the fix noted in this thread: AERO themes causes severe lag in the web browsers. Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

None of the above has worked. Can't find a task to kill and restart when it happens. If I kill dwm.exe, the process comes back up in the cpu hogging/'stuttering mode.

Disabling aero will make it go away, but it never did this before.

I haven't rolled back drivers. I've been on numerous versions of drivers. All having the issue. The older driver was the more frequent the issue seemed to occur(until recently).

As far as disabling Aero goes, the specfic setting is desktop composition. If I disable that under advanced settings, issue goes away. Enable it, and stuttering comes back. Reboot clears the issue temporarily, until it comes back(typically a program crash causes it to reoccur).

While digging a little deeper into nvidia, found some threads about dual monitors being the issue. I disabled my 2nd monitor and issue went way(desktop composition enabled). Not sure how the 2nd monitor is causing the issue.

Could you check event viewer and post any eventID's logged ?

With those we can try finding the right direction to search for a full fix.
Better than doing guess work :)

Could be, but I have 2 monitors, totally different from each other (one analog and one digital, one is 23" the other is 19"), and a TV screen (40" full HD) in a triple monitor setup, and never have issues.
Some event must have been logged on your system Brill, with that we don't need to guess, and most likely find a precedent with the correct fix.

It's like fixing a car...before starting to fix things randomly we need to know where the root cause lies :)

Ranger4 said:

Brill. What monitors are you using & are they both the same. I have a dual monitor set up but they are both identical monitors & I don't have any problems like you do. I also use an NVIDIA gpu, but it is only a GT 610, as I don't play any games.

I use a GTS450, lol :)
Also no games. Still works perfectly :)

EDIT: that isn't true anymore. I changed it out recently with my brother's GT740 to support the TV...