Agent EXE is Causing High WMI Activity

Desktop App Bug Report
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Hello, the past week or so I have been experiencing some weird issues with my system. I’ll be playing a game, whether it’s a blizzard game or a steam game, and I will notice stutters happening in game after gaming for an hour or so. I’ll look over at my MSI Afterburner/Rivatuner UI in game and see my CPU at 100%, which it rarely gets to 100% in the games I play. I open Task Manager and see WMIPrevSE running around 60-80% CPU usage. Weird, so i scoured the internet and was resetting the service each time it happened and it was fixing it sometimes but not all the time and a full system restart would usually fix it.

I usually launch Battle.net and Steam right after rebooting my computer, and I’ve done this for years without issues. Today, while troubleshooting, I noticed that Agent.exe had 14 instances running simultaneously. This was also observed while using Performance monitor, and seeing the threads open all at once under WMIPrevSE, but the PIDs kept changing and I could not identify it fast enough in task manager since my PC was being throttled by the service.

After closing Battle.net and all Agent.exe processes, my WMI activity immediately returned to normal. This led me to investigate further. Previously, I couldn’t understand why the PIDs in Windows Event Viewer didn’t match those in Task Manager. During this process, I noticed an Agent.exe process disappear, which seemed unusual.

I then observed that multiple instances of Agent.exe were constantly opening and closing. Every few seconds, one would stop and disappear, then reopen—sometimes alongside additional instances—which resulted in up to 14 running at once, this was done before I closed battle.net and all the agent.exe processes.

At this point, I’m unsure whether this behavior indicates a corrupted Battle.net installation on my system or an issue that needs to be addressed on your end. Would you recommend reinstalling Battle.net, or is this a known issue?

I will say I have noticed this occurring while I am gaming and not when the system is on stand by.

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The Blizzard Battle.net Desktop Application requires access to Windows Management Instrumentation to work correctly. If this has become corrupted or disabled, you can follow the steps below to reset it:

Resetting the WMI Repository

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As I stated in my post, I ‘ve done this before and restarted my computer but it keeps occurring.

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Are you seeing the ‘BLZBNTBNA00000005 (Battle.net Agent Went to Sleep)’ error in the Battle.net launcher?

I’m pretty sure something changed over the last 2-3 weeks.
In my case, the issue was actually related to communication with Battle.net services, which apparently was being restricted because I was using a VPN.

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No I’m not. I’ve seen it once or twice in the last month but it’s been unrelated to what is happening with my system.

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I just wanted to say I too noticed high CPU being used by WMI Provider Host and stuttering in other games. Typically 3-7% overall, but I didn’t check per core, it might have been maxing one out as there’s 20.

After doing some digging with Process Monitor and determining the culprit was CIMWin32.dll and then shutting down battle.net, I noticed the CPU basically drop to zero.

I wonder if this is a recent change, because I then went to google the battle.net agent/WMI host using CPU and came across this post. I’ll continue monitoring when I next fire up battle.net.