SVCHOST reproducing like bunnies!

I have read a few posts on the BBS but nothing I have come across seems to be in line with the problem I am experiencing.
I boot up and all is relatively okay.
Within 15 minutes I will have 7 svchost.exe showing in the process of task manager. Some are local, network, system. Anywhere from 21000K to a few hundred. My computer grinds to slower than a crawl.
If I go in and shut them down in task manager and things hum for about 10 minutes and them BAM! More freaking svchost bunnies.
I have a XP Home Edition
Running Nortons AV 2007
Zone Alarm
Compaq Presario 6027US
Pentium 4 CPU 2.00 GHz
1.99 GHz 512 MB RAM

Any ideas?

 

Hi, JETS.

It is normal to have several instances of svchost.exe show in Task Manager. I currently have six instances with memory usage ranging from 2,992K to 106,080K peak usage. However, none of mine have anything described in the "User Name" column. The only process I have with a "User Name" is the "System Idle Process" and the "User Name" is SYSTEM.

Double check the spelling of each svchost.exe process. If you have one spelled as scvhost.exe instead of svchost.exe, then I suspect you have malware issues. (You can click on the "Image Name" column header to sort the list alphabetically so you can quickly identify/compare the processes in question.)

If you keep an eye on the CPU column in Task Manager when your computer slows to a crawl, then you might be able to identify the process that is slowing your computer down.


EDIT: Since you reported your svchost.exe task memory usage as "anywhere from 21000K to a few hundred ", you may want to consider increasing your RAM to 1 GB or more. According to HP's Compaq Presario 6027US Desktop PC - Product Specifications, you can have up to 2 GB of RAM installed.

 

Churning away

Thanks for the info Mailman.

When I look at task manager the computer shows around as 97% idle but the computer never stops churning. I really mean never. The simple act of closing a window takes a couple minutes and then for a couple minutes the image of the window is still on the desktop and the slowly diminishes.

I ran restore last night. I made sure to go back to when I know there was no problems. It did not resolve the problem. This problem just started this week. I can not think of anything downloaded and/or installed in the past week leading to this problem. When I ran restore I went back to a month ago.

Is there anything I can do to give the experts the kind of information that will help determine the problem?

 

I suspect at least part of the problem might be you have many processes that are using your limited RAM and swapping information to/from your hard disk. Does the hard disk light on your computer indicate the hard drive is often busy?

Another possibility is malware on your computer (that might be missed by Norton AV). Please check for malware via the instructions in this link.

If malware is found, please post details about that here and paste a fresh HijackThis (HJT) log here.

Even if you don't find any indications of malware, a HijackThis log might help us determine what is slowing your computer down so much because it will provide many details about what is actively running on your computer. You might have one or more applications (such as Logitech Desktop Messenger, for example) that might be unnecessary to have running in the background or you might have two applications that are known/suspected to interfere with each other.

These suggestions at least give you something to do while waiting for more ideas.