Automatic Updates processor and memory usage

Recently I've been seeing Automatic Updates (wuauclt.exe) on many Windows XP Professional and sometimes Windows XP Home machines running at 50% processor usage and jumping back and forth between 30mb and 60mb memory usage. This usually occurs right after a restart and causes the whole machine to lag for about 5-10 minutes.

I've also noticed it periodically doing this whenever Windows decides to check for updates.

My solution so far has been to disable Automatic Updates and also disable the Security Center through services.msc to get rid of the issue, but this is only a temporary solution.

Also, today I saw the svchost.exe which runs the wuauclt.exe gobble up every inch of physical memory and virtual memory, and continue to spike the processor at around 25%. Killing the entire svchost.exe process and wuauclt.exe's solved the issue immediately.

I wonder if this is yet another Microsoft bug, or if it's somehow related to hardware or some other issue.

Can anyone offer me some insight into this problem? Would be greatly appreciated.

I noticed that autoupdates kills my laptop and stops networking from running for about 3 minutes on startup. I finally killed the security center and that wasn't a problem anymore.