Three weeks ago Johannes wrote a diary (http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1535) about vulnerabilities in Centrino device drivers for Windows and the PROSet management software.

Update: Intel is telling customers that a patch should be ready within 2 weeks (thanks Matthias).

Intel initially issued a big file (100MB) that you had to download, but at least it upgraded everything on your machine, if it needed upgrades.
After rebooting in the next few days I noticed that my machine is a bit slower then it was. A look at Task manager output, or excellent Process Explorer from Sysinternals showed that a process called S24EvMON.exe is using quite a bit of CPU, as you can see below.



That process gets started by the Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless Service, which is used to manage the wireless card.

After battling with this, and as I was going to a conference, I went to Dell's web site and noticed that they released their own version of drivers. Hoping that this will fix the problem, I downloaded another 90MB to find out that Dell's drivers have the same problem.
I initially thought that there is maybe something else on my machine causing this, but as news started spreading around, it looks that everyone with (at least) 2915ABG/2200BG wireless cards is affected. F-secure posted this in their weblog as well: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-082006.html#00000954.

So, you might ask: what do we do now? I would recommend that you install the patches. If you don't use wireless normally you can stop the four services that Intel software needs (Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless Event Log, Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless Registry Service, Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless Service, Intel(R) PROSet/Wireless SSO Service). I put them on manual so they don't start automatically, but if I need to connect to a wireless network I can manually start them.
This way you at least won't be vulnerable, but your machine will be a bit slower due to bugs in these services.

Let's hope Intel will release a fixed version soon.

UPDATE:

The easiest way to start and stop these services (so you actually run them only when you really need them) is to create a batch file that will do this job for you (so you don't have to click manually on all 4 of them).  You can use the sc start and sc stop commands to perform this for you.
Thanks to reader Paul for reminding us about this.

UPDATE 2:

Olli, Steve and Andrew wrote to tell us that they don't use Intel's utilities to manage their wireless card. Indeed, you can use the built-in Windows Wireless Zero Config service, in which case you only need to patch the driver for your wireless card, so you are not vulnerable. As the problem with CPU/memory leaks are in the management service, this is an effective workaround at least until the management service is fixed.
While the built-in configuration service works ok, I personally like Intel's utilities as they give you quite a bit more control over the wireless card and have pretty good monitoring programs (which sometimes come very handy, when you are troubleshooting problems with the wireless card).