Jorolat

You're missing quotes... Also, does the problem occur when you run in Safe Mode? Do you have an anti-virus running as well as the McAfee firewall? Try disabling both of them (after disconnecting from the internet) and see if the problem persists. Do you have all the latest drivers for your hardware? Motherboard included? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Good grief - I read with quotes as without quotes, its been a long day... I installed XP Home a second time & the problem wasn't there. Added SP2 and the problem wasn't there. Connected to the net & downloaded updates, got distracted and then noticed the problem had come back. The services using the svchost.exe I'm interested in are: svchost.exe PID=956 AudioSrv, CryptSvc, Dhcp, ERSvc, EventSystem, helpsvc, lanmanserver, lanmanworkstation, Netman,Nla,RasMan, Schedule, seclogon,SENS,SharedAccess, ShellHWDetection, srservice, TapiSrv, Themes, TrkWks, W32Time, winmgmt, wscsvc,wuauserv I appreciate what you're saying about latest updates - I've been advised to leave any mobo updates alone. Bearing in mind my very limited knowledge I would like to work backwards from the above list to see if the problem area can be identified that way. Any help would be very appreciated! BTW After using the quotes properly I just got something like "svchost.exe" so I think I'm still doing something wrong. Can tasklist be used to 'interrogate' each of the above services to identify the problem? Jorolat

Hi Hadrick & thankyou for replying! Thanks also for the link - I am a single user with just one computer connected to the internet. I ran my antivirus and stinger with no result. I'm rather a newbie and I've got part of tasklist to work but in the link it says: To view the list of services that are running in Svchost: Click Start on the Windows taskbar, and then click Run. In the Open box, type CMD, and then press ENTER. Type Tasklist /SVC, and then press ENTER. Tasklist displays a list of active processes. The /SVC switch shows the list of active services in each process. For further information about a process, type the following command, and then press ENTER: Tasklist /FI "PID eq processID" (with the quotation marks) The PID number of svchost I'm interested in is 956 but I can't get the Tasklist /FI part of the above to work. Here are the combinations I've tried: C:\Documents and Settings\John Robert>TASKLIST /FI 956 eq SENS ERROR: Invalid Argument/Option - 'eq'. Type "TASKLIST /?" for usage. C:\Documents and Settings\John Robert>TASKLIST /FI PID eq 956 ERROR: Invalid Argument/Option - 'eq'. Type "TASKLIST /?" for usage. C:\Documents and Settings\John Robert>TASKLIST /FI PID eq SENS ERROR: Invalid Argument/Option - 'eq'. Type "TASKLIST /?" for usage. What dumb thing am I doing wrong? Jorolat

Help me someone - please! Jorolat

About 4 or 5 days ago I changed my hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP Home. I think the problem described below has been there since day 1 but I only took notice of it yesterday (btw I installed SP2 & McAfee firewall before connecting to the net). On Windows Task Manager I currently have 5 instances of svchost.exe listed and one of them, with a PID number of 956, is continuously reading & writing to the disc. Today it has so far read 670,000,000 bytes and written about a million less. From its PID number I've been able to establish that this instance of svchost is associated with: 956 AudioSrv, CryptSvc, Dhcp, ERSvc, EventSystem, helpsvc, lanmanserver, lanmanworkstation, Netman,Nla,RasMan, Schedule, seclogon,SENS,SharedAccess, ShellHWDetection, srservice, TapiSrv, Themes, TrkWks, W32Time, winmgmt, wscsvc,wuauserv All this is new to me, if anyone can tell me which of the above may be causing the problem (I'm a single-user on a single computer), and how I go about disabling it, I would be very grateful! Jorolat