I am trying to free up some of the load on the cpu in Vista. AudioEndpointBuilder is a required service that runs in one of my Svchost processes. It is a hog and I would like to get around it. I know a sound card upgrade in XP can free up the cpu but in Vista I'm reading stuff about how the audio is required to be run through the OS. If anybody has any input I would greatly appreciate it. On a side note, I have over 12 Svchost.exe processes running on my system at once. I know 6-8 can be normal, but what about 12? thanks