svchost.exe

[Guest]

I have looked at all the messages in this section dealing with svchost.exe
causing high system utilization, but I don't see a single response that
explains what to do to reduce it. I wiped my entire system and rebuilt it.
I've installed McAfee anti-virus and scanned for problems to no avail. The
only software I've installed is Office Standard. I haven't yet installed
anti-spyware software, but that's next. Since this is affecting so many
people, is there no one out there with a tested answer to this problem?

 

[Michael Sheppard]

If you open a command prompt and type tasklist /svc
it will show you all the services that run under svchost.exe. These are
usually necessary dll's that are required by the system. You might be able
to use the command to see if there are any services you might be able stop
if you don't need them. On my system the svchost usually uses about 40-50MB
or RAM.

 

[Jon Erlandson]

svchost.exe "hosts" services and loads what the registry tells it to.
Spyware and dialers create registry entries that svchost loads as windows
boots and so if these spyware programs are active, svchost can show high cpu
utilization.

After running your virus and antispyware programs and you still have high
utilization install HijackThis and have the program "scan and save a log
file" and post that log to one of the help forums listed on Tomcoyote (see
link below.) You can also examine the log yourself and copy into google the
name of any suspicious processes and get information on it i.e.,
"services.exe" (if this file is anywhere but in c:\windows\system32 it's a
problem.)

Some great free tools. If you don't have spybot, cwshredder, spywareguard
and HijackThis you should download and install.

Trend Micro House Call
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Spybot Search & Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Ad-Aware
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/

CWShredder
http://www.intermute.com/spysubtract/cwshredder_download.html

McAfee Stinger
http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

HijackThis
http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/

SpywareGuard
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareguard.html