Microsoft has confirmed that they are investigating reports of high CPU usage in the SearchUI.exe component of Cortana after users install the Windows 10 v1903 KB4512941 cumulative update.

In a Twitter post from the Windows Update team, Microsoft has stated that they are investigating the issue and will provide a fix in an upcoming release.

"We are currently investigating an issue where users are reporting high CPU usage linked to SeachUI.EXE after installing the optional update on August 30 (KB4512941). We will provide an update in an upcoming release."

For users affected by this issue, they have noticed that after installing the Windows 10 v1903 KB4512941 cumulative update. the SearchUI.exe Cortana process would use up a lot of the PC's CPU or get sudden CPU spikes.

High CPU Usage in Cortana

This issue appears to be a bug in the latest version of Cortana that occurs when users have disabled the ability to send local searches to Bing.

It was discovered that a temporary fix for this issue is to enable BingSearch again. This can be done by setting the BingSearchEnabled Registry value to 1 under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search key.

Other solutions were also found as described in our original article on this issue.

While Microsoft has acknowledged that they are looking into the issue, they have not updated the KB4512941 support bulletin, which still states that "Microsoft is not currently aware of any issues with this update."