SVCHOST hogging CPU on startup

I've read previous posts and none seem to zero in on this situation.
On startup, 1 of the 4 or 5 processes of SVCHOST wants to eat up 86-99% of CPU for about a minute and it's MEM USAGE steadily climbs from 2000+ K to around 7236 K before stopping and returning CPU% to normal. It's USER NAME is NETWORK SERVICE, one of which NO OTHER process has...they are all LOCAL SERVICE, SYSTEM or my user name.
The process can be disabled as soon as desktop appears and I can hit ctrl-alt-del to get to it and I don't see any ill effects.

Nothing shows in AdAware or Norton 2003. (both updated)

Any idea what's going on or what it is? During the period of MEM USAGE climbing and CPU @ 100% nothing opens...I'm sure everyone knows the story from previous posts.

P4 2.4 512MB 120GB XP HOME

 

NETWORK SERVICE can be a perfectly legit user to be running a process under svchost.exe.

For a better idea of what is going on, do start~run~cmd to bring up a DOS window /w command prompt and then

tasklist /svc > c:\running-services.txt and print a copy of the running-services.txt file for reference.

tasklist /FI "username eq NETWORK SERVICE " to see exactly which one(s) are running under that user account. Then from your printed sheet, get the PID (process ID) of any that run that way. If you had PIDs of 346 and 1798 running under NETWORK SERVICE then

tasklist /FI "pid eq 346 " for more information and the same for the PID 1798.

With the above information, you can probably dig out details but if you want help, post the results back here including the contents of the text file.

Note that we will probably eventually need you to generate a Hijackthis log but lets see if tasklist will give enough information.

 

Joe Locke--You are not alone
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=SVCHOST++"NETWORK+SERVICE"
This thread seems to have a solution (I did not read it all the way through)
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_20835581.html

 

Isn't TASKLIST only available in PRO?

Doing some reading at the links provided...

 

ive also had this in a computer i was working on a while back, and i found this from microsoft
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324139

but the only way to fix it is to reformat.

 

Joe - sorry about tasklist. You are correct and XP-home doesn't have it. In fact, I found this at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article10-002

 

No prob, Newt. The backup program not installed by default...is the the ERUNT registry backup program or something different?

Sorry to sway from the main thread subject a bit...

(I'm still lost on the SVCHOST thing. I went ahead and temporarily disable it's loading in the registry and all seems OK so far. I found 2 instances of it and exported the entry to a file so I could import again if I saw any troubles...)