J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
I think this is a FAQ, but I can't remember the A if there is one .. (-:

I use bitMeter2 with the audio feedback turned on; I know this would drive most people
nuts, but each to his own. It alerts me to unusual activity.

Of late, I've noticed something is using my bandwidth to a TINY but fairly consistent
extent: I have BM2 set to alert every 100 kB, and it's doing so about every 28-30 seconds
- as you can see, very low level, but higher than before. Looking at the graph in BM2,
it's about 1/3 or 1/4 outgoing, 2/3 or 3/4 incoming.
http://255soft.uk/temp/Clipboard01.gif is a sample grab (red is incoming, green outgoing
[shows as yellow where coincident with incoming]) - as you can see, we're not talking huge
data volumes here!

I've turned off everything _I_ can think of that might be causing it, to no effect.
Eventually, random sniping in Task Manager, I found one of the svchost instances (there
are currently 13 of them, all belonging to "User"s LOCAL SERVICE, NETWORK SERVICE, or
SYSTEM - none to me) is responsible, but I'm none the wiser of course. And killing it, it
reappears after a few tens of seconds. But obviously I don't want to go just killing
random processes in TM.

Being less paranoid than some here, I'm not too _worried_ - at such a low rate, it's not
exactly looting my pron collection, and it's more incoming than outgoing anyway, which
makes me _doubt_ it's some sort of security probing. I'm just _curious_ as to what it is -
and I feel that surely it must be a common wonderment, and I'd have thought there must be
some way simpler than using Wireshark or Process Explorer to answer the simple question in
the subject.

Probably just a loopback from your router/modem or another comp on your network.
Install Wireshark and see. http://www.wireshark.org