Library ucrtbase.dll consumes high amounts of CPU

Recently I noticed that some application (DBeaver) can suddenly start to load the processor heavily (1 core). The application that loaded the processor (at different times) referred to the library ucrtbase.dll.

I found out this way:

I opened procmon and on the Threads tab I saw 1 thread that loads the process.

I saw a call stack like this: ucrtbase.dll!configthreadlocale+0x50

and it points to the file: C:\Windows\System32\ucrtbase.dll

I looked at the file properties of this file and saw:

File version: 10.0.19041.3636

Date of change: 14.11.2023 22:21

It seems to me that it is outdated.

How do I update it correctly?

I dismiss viruses, because I checked for virustotal – everything is fine.

Well, the file has a digital signature.

I ran a virus scan – everything is OK.

I have already run a system Update before, but the file has not been updated.

Since this file seems to belong to Visual C or C++, it occurred to me to update the installed components in Visual Studio Installer.

A simple update of Visual Studio Community 2022 and 2019 via the standard VS Installer did not help.

I tried installing Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable separately, downloading them from here for both x86 and x64 versions, but it didn’t help either:

learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170

I tried to uninstall the old version and the new versions first, and then install the latest version. It didn’t help either. After reinstalling, the computer was rebooted.

I found 114 such files “ucrtbase.dll” on my entire disk in different folders with different installed applications.

Here are the most relevant:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x64\ucrtbase.dllC:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\Remote Debugger\x86\ucrtbase.dll

File version: 10.0.1.14393.795

Date of change: 16.08.2024 21:42

How to upgrade it correctly?

I expect it is a root cause.