I'll answer the easy questions here - I obvioously have some work to do on
the processes and I'll get back to you on that. See below

"Gerry" wrote:

MG

Do you shutdown your computer after use or leave it on 24/7?
I shut down every night .

Try Ctrl+Alt+Delete to select Task Manager and click the Performance
Tab. Under Commit Charge what is the Total, the Limit and the Peak?
Total - 494600
Limit - 1135188
Peak - 593136

How large is your hard disk and how much free space. Right click on
your C drive in Windows and select Properties to get this information.
Total - 74.5 GB
Available - 39GB

What is your CPU processor speed? How much RAM memory? Right click on
your My Computer icon on your Desktop and select Properties to get
this information.
Processor - 1.7GHz
RAM - 768 MB

You need to identify which application is generating excessive use
of svchost.exe. Process Explorer provides more information than Task
Manager.

Download Process Explorer.

For further information about Process Explorer see he
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...sExplorer.mspx

To ascertain which service is causing the problem select the svchost
producing the high CPU usage, right click, select Properties,
Services. Note there are the full names and some explanation of what
each service does.

You will find further information on Services he
http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12

To trace the particular Service involved you need to turn off each
service in turn and then restore it noting what effect it has on CPU
usage. However, you need to take care and watch what other Services
are dependent on that service. When you click on the Dependencies
tab allow it a little time to display the information.

It would be helpful if you could post the Command Line of the svchost
process generating the excessive CPU usage. In Process Explorer place
cursor on Process and select Properties, Image.

BTW McAfee and Norton are well known for having a large footprint i.e.
placing heavy demands on the system memory and CPU.

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


MG wrote:
I've read many posts regarding the lengthy start-up issues associated
with svchost and MS updates - mine appears somewhat different. After
booting up, and after all services have started, my machine runs
through cycles of CPU - viewed on Task Manager these spkies are
typically around 40% of CPU, sometimes higher, and are occurring on a
very consistent cycle, around every 6-8 seconds. This happens even
with nothing open on my machine.

I've run all the scans to check for viruses and spyware. I can see
that these processes running are within svchost.exe and/or
services.exe. I've tried shutting down everything that is in my
startup and the problem still exists. This cycling of CPU goes on
non-stop, all the time. As it eats CPU on these cycles, other
processes are now affected - example, a full virus scan now takes
about twice as long as it used to. As there are tons of tasks
running within svchost, I have no idea how to narrow this down. I'm
running XP Home/SP2 and have applied all updates automatically. Any
ideas?