out of nowhere, my pc started to run very slowly, checked system restore, found that something called "software distribution service 2" is installed, apparantly as a part of the automatic windows update. microsoft does not have anything official about this. afetr googling for a while, found that a lot of people are having problems with it and no one knows what exactly this thing does and why it's causing so many problems, mainly things slowing down, and some random deletion of emails/files, and denial of access to web pages. almost sounds like a censoring tool or something that monitors software legitimacy. (because the applications that i downloaded as freeware were the ones running slow, the windows environment in general.)

i think this is a bug someone created to tip off microsoft. how come MS just never got around to get rid of it? the forum posts about it dates back to 2004. seems like it only affects windows xp sp2.

here's what i did to fix the problem. at least now it looks like it's fixed because i got my normal speed back again.

1) go to control panel > add/remove apps > check show updates
2) scroll down to windows hot fixes, select the fix that was installed around the time the pc started to slow down (for me, it was a security update installed at 8pm today, i know it's that one because the pervious one was in july and i didn't have any problems back then).
3) remove this hotfix, you need to restart to finish the removal

i also tried system restore, but as many people said in forums, it does not restore to a point BEFORE this update.

oh, and don't forget to turn off automatic update. i was so stupid before that i let windows automatically download AND install them for me. now i choose to only get the notices and select what to download and install myself.