svchost bloating everything up

Okay. Just done a clean install of Windows 2000 after repartitioning. Installed a bit of stuff. Suddenly, lots of normal things (rearranging desktop icons, opening the Start Meny etc) have taken about a minute to do. I had no idea why this was happening till I looked in the Task Manager and saw that svchost was filling up the CPU usage to 100%! Why? (P4, 3GHz, HT disabled)

UPDATE
1. There is another copy of svchost running but this one doesn't use any cpu
2. It won't let me terminate the bloaty one.

 

It would not be unusual to have up to 5 instances of svchost.exe running. First thing is to be sure what we are dealing with though.

Is it possible you are seeing scvhost.exe rather than svchost.exe? The former is a sorta nasty virus and the latter is a 'wrapper' service that does very little itself but house from 2 to 5-6 other services and allow them to run.

Another possibility would be that you are infected with a version of the Nachi worm.

Svchost (the real one from Microsoft) itself is almost never (I'd say never but with computers, ..... ) a problem but some dll it houses and enables could be.

Click for a good description of what svchost.exe does and how to check it.

 

No, it's definitely svchost. I'm downloading a Nachi remover anyway, though.

EDIT
...and it turns out I don't have Nachi, Nimda OR Blaster...

 

Nothing weird in the Device Manager either. Any ideas at all? Nobody?

 

wiffles - I'm moving this to the security section.

Download, install, update, and run first Ad-aware and then Spybot (both linked in my signature) to clean out the major bits of spyware you might have.

Then wander to Merijn.org, get a copy of Hijackthis and use it to generate a log then post the log here.

I don't know nearly enough to deal with the log contents but at least a couple of the security-expert staff folks do and can take it from there.

If you still have problems with svchost.exe chewing up all your CPU time after you get the problems taken care of, we can proceed from there but I'm guessing that this will take care of your problem.

 

I managed to get this problem solved - I installed SP4 and it went away immediately. Whether it fixed a problem in Windows or overwrote a "virused" file I don't know.

A similar thing had happened a couple of times with netsvc, but they seem to have gone away now. Anyway, thanks for all your help.

 

Thanks for posting back and glad the update worked for you. That SP did plug a few leaks and it sounds like one of them was causing your problems.