Svchost and Svchost.exe - Crashs, CPU maximization, viruses, exploits and more.

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Oh and in addition...don't know if this matters or not but I'm runnin at 1.3 ghz pentium III Windows XP service pack 2 all required updates should be installed unless some new ones have come about in the last month...I also recently attempted to use the firewall supplied by windows,(it was proviously disabled by my old AV software), this was unsuccessful...I will update with exact wording of the code if ever get my computer running long enough to find out...

I had that problem in my son's laptop and it was a trojan/malware. Antivirus s/w didn't find it because it is not a virus. Best guess was a subscription service he signed up for, decided not to use, and didnot pay for. Ba$tard$. I had to run in Safe mode with a anit-malware s/w downloaded from another PC and run on a memory stick. I recommendation is try other anti-malware s/w's, maybe even several, to be SURE it is not a bug. I was running fully updated Norton and it did not find it. Adaware caught several, but not all. Avast found more, but not all.
Good luck. Now i am getting the svchost crashes related to my VPN tunnel (Cisco)...

30 or so seconds before i am sending this, i ended SVCHOST.EXE in the processtree from the task manager. Nothing happend. Nothing is happening. As in eveything is fine. I am starting to wonder the importance of SVCHOST. I run on a dell inspiron 8600 Widescreen Microsoft Windows XP pro.

This virus is bazaar; we formatted the whole computer after finding that our service host was corrupted and duplicating. Before formatting the PC we had memory failures so we pulled out that defective ram. After formatting the computer we reinstalled windows and it was there again. After this we bought a serial ATA hard drive, loaded windows and the virus appeared again. It seams as if the virus is not on our network. My guess is this svchost.exe modified my ram or bios and stored it self there. This seams mind blowing but my question is “ IS this Possibel?”

Many of the viruses that infect svchost are network borne... make sure to install your OS, and turn on a firewall on the machine *before* connecting to your network. If not, you can be infected frighteningly fast.

Check also your Internet connection. A very slow/crap connection can cause a service running under svchost to loop as it waits for replies causing the CPU usuage to peg out.

This article resolved the issues I had with SVCHOST.EXE and is an absolute lifesaver. In my case the problem was caused by a user error. On Friday of last week I shut down my computer because I was having a network problem. The machine began installing Microsoft updates but after half an hour I decided it must have hung and switched off the power. Clearly it hadn't hung (or if it HAD, it hadn't completed the update process) and I ended up with the SVCHOST error as described in this article.

I was about to re-install everything when I happened across this article. Heart-felt thanks to the author. Keep up the good work!

This sure equals what I'm experiencing: 100% CPU utilization. I narriwed it to svchost, axed the one using the most memory, and we're back to normal. Course lots of stuff doesn't work, but it "solved" the problem. BUT my firewall is always on. multiple virus checkers are not finding anything amiss. still puzzled

It's misleading to suggest that viruses and worms are the only cause of this problem. On a virus and worm-free system, svchost.exe can consume all the CPU if the WBEM registry is corrupted. In this case, it's necessary to stop the winmgmt service, rebuild the WBEM registry, and restart the service. This turned out to be the true problem and solution in my case. See:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SvchostexeSucksCPUAndRebuldingTheWMIWBEMRepository.aspx

No one ever said it was the only cause. There are many ways that svchost can exhibit problems - malware is simply the most common.

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