svchost memory leaks

Hello all. I am new to this forum and hope someone can help me with this darn leak in the virtual memory in svchost in WXP home edition.I recently reformatted my hard drive and re-installed XP home.After I restored some of my files from my external hard drive. I let windows re-install updates with automatic updates until service pack 1. Thats when the problems started. First media player would not work.So I thought I could fix that by updating to sp2.That install failed "unable to read or write from database ". I have 2.5 gig free on a 20 gig hard drive with 256 of RAM.I simply upgraded to media player10 form version 8.Media player works now.However when I booted the system I got the low on virtual memory message. I peaked in task manager and saw that one of the five svchost.exe was leaking.The paging file starts at 300 MB and gradually goes up to 1.5 gigs before it slowly goes backdown. The ram stays low because I use RamFreer and cachman freeware.The whole process takes almost 15 minutes.It is annoying. I have scanned for virus using mcafee ,AVG ,and Norton on both my internal and external drives.None show up.I still cannot upgrade to sp2.Due to this problem and the fact that it kept fragging my C drive I have set my virtual paging file to 1024 mb in the low and high range. I would attach My sysinfo but I can't get it to run either.

 

Welcome to the forum Hydro,
It seems that something has gotten back onto your system. What you can do is this. Download nlite, and download SP2 network install. Have your XP CD handy, copy the contents of the cd into a folder. Follow the instructions in Nlite to slipstream the service pack, make the cd bootable and burn. Now you will have xpsp2 on cd. Start again Format and install.

When installing windows:

1) format
2) install
3) drivers
4) update
5) restore data and apps

The reason for that is you may have an exploited app or data that the AV cant deal with. And restoring the data before a full update can cause all sorts of problems in some rare cases.

 

svchost memory leak

Is there any way to address this problem without reformatting? I really don't care if I have sp2.I just want to stop the leak.I just spent two weeks getting all my drivers and programs re-installed.I don't want to back up the c drive with this leak still going on and I don't want to restore my hard drive programs and applications from the external drive backup set that I used before as it may have been corrupted. The next backup set on the external drive is almost two years old and it may also be corrupt.Do you have a plan B?

Thanks Dcrypter

 

I would try to find out what is preventing you from updating to SP2. XPsp1 had leak issues.

Follow these steps: 1. Open a command prompt. 2. Type tasklist /svc, and press [Enter].â€

You can do a search on what is running ad see what other issues there may be.

 

svchost memory leak

Thanks for your plan B decrypter.I tried the tasklist cmd before and I get a prompt that says 'tasklist' is not recognized as an internal or external command.If I choose to leave my computer on 24/7 and reboot as few times as possible with my swap file set at 1024 what would happen? Other than the leak all programs are working, but I am concerned that this will eventually degrade the system.My C drive is over 5 years old and I have ran chkdsk without finding any bad sectors.My original XP Home disk is the upgrade disk Dell provided for Windows ME. The backup external file I used to restore some applications is FAT32.Could this be an issue? Ready for plan C.

 

Hello Hydromark,

Tasklist is only on XP Pro. Download it from here and move it to the \Windows\System32 folder.

http://www.computerhope.com/download/winxp.htm

As an FYI, that upgrade disc is the full OS, can be used as Decrypter posted or can be used as a clean install. The difference in the install would be that XP will ask for proof of a previous windows version. You should have that in the form of your WinME disc.

Regards - Charles

 

svchost memory leak

Well I tried tasklist again after downloading and now I get out of memory message.Any other ideas?

 

Hello Hydromark,

Get rid of the current page file (virtual memory), it may be corrupted.

Right click My Computer
Properties
Advanced tab
Performance
Setting bar
Advanced tab
Virtual Memory
Change bar
Select C drive/partition and tick No Paging file

Reboot, the system will re establish it.

Otherwise, a repair install: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Regards - Charles

 

svchost memory leaks.

I finally gave up on fixing the memory leak and reformatted.This time I re-installed the original Windows ME edition that came with the Dell 4100. This also required installing original drivers fro ME.I then installed The upgrade XP edition and installed the upgrade drivers from dell support.I noticed that the entire time that I was doing the upgrades that a pop-up from DLPatch.com kept trying to get me to download a registry cleaner.I called the road runner support to re-install my drivers for the cable modem before I added the printer and external hard drive and ATI Graphics drivers. The first thing we did was to get an EZ firewall up and running to prevent the constant pinging I was getting from the internet.This helped me to finally get all my hardware installed and drivers up to date.I then manually installed each windows update until service pack 2. I noticed that both my file systems are now FAT32. I don't know if this was part of the original problem or not but there is no memory leak.I am slowing re-installing as many programs and applications from my back up drive as possible. However the amount of memory that the updates is using will make it difficult to get all my old programs back on the internal C drive.Thanks everyone for the plans.Plan A was the way to go.

 

Thats good to hear that you're getting up and running. There are some goofy problems with Windows that are only corrected through a format and install.
The other thing is that if you want to convert your FAT32 partitions to ntfs, open a command prompt and type the command
Example (convert c: /fs:ntfs)
convert [drive]: /fs:[file system]
Select no to force dismount and yes for convert on boot.

 

Hi Hydromark,

You ended up with FAT32 because you upgraded from a 9X Windows OS which can only read FAT.

My advice would be to leave the FAT32 file system unless your drives are greater han 80 GB.

There are no benefits to NTFS on partition/drive less than 80GB unless you want the extra security options that come with NTFS. You could mix the two if one of your partitions/drives is bigger.

I doubt very much that the file system had anything to do with your problem.

Regards - Charles