Preface

The Inventory and Compatibility appraisal service (InventorySvc) on Windows is interesting. As its name suggests, this service (let’s call it “the appraisal service” hereinafter) has something to do with the compatibility workarounds that Microsoft maintains for old applications (this article on MSDN is probably relevant).

Unfortunately, the appraisal service is also a big player when it comes to unexpected, unexplainable CPU hogging on recent versions of Windows. The symptom? Simple - just open Task Manager and observe that an svchost.exe process pegging a CPU core for multiple minutes.