SVCHOST - Network Service

[luke.mccormick]

I've witnessed this on four computers now over the last week.

I started with a fresh install on my desktop with a Linksys WMP54G wireless card in my desktop, first time installing with the card installed. Fresh install of Vista x64 Business SP1. SVChost is spiking to 100% from the Network Service user, kill the service and all is fine. After 4 hours of troubleshooting I find that it's because of the linksys card, pull it out, fresh install works fine.

Now it's a different story with the other three. All workstations are running fine until the end of last week when we all noticed the systems starting to lag quite a bit. looking at the task manager shows svchost from the network service spiking to 100% cpu usage, none of these boxes have linksys wireless cards, mainly broadcom and intel, and wireless is not being used at the time. systems will continue to lag until the svchost service is killed. One of the boxes is running Vista SP1 x64 Business, another running Vista SP1 x86 Ultimate, and another running Vista SP1 x86 Home Premium. All are laptops. No one has noticed anything on any desktops except for the issue described in the last paragraph, which seems unrelated. All of these current three systems had no issues until about a week ago. All are patched to current patch level. We are all suspecting a current windows update. Other flaky issues it causes;

I will be connected to the internet, and everything works fine, MSN Messenger, Skype, VMWARE bridged to ethernet internet works, Opera works fine. however the network icon in the corner will have a warning sign over the icon.

I also had this morning, where it appeared to start shutting down services randomly very quick, and then reboots. After that it worked fine but svchost would still spike.

As of now we are using task manager to kill the process as needed. It seems as though in some situations if the computer is on long enough it does not bother but the process still needs to be killed a few times before it stops trying. Using process explorer shows no sub processes running under THIS instance of svchost so nothing is 100% obvious to me yet, once it happens again I will report the PID number that it runs as.

As of now we are just curious as to whether anyone else is seeing any issues.

Thanks for any input in advance.

[Mr Snrub]

svchost.exe is a host service inside which many services can share a virtual address space - if any one of these services has a memory leak, bug or performance problem then the entire process will be affected, making it tricky at first glance to see which service is the problematic one.

Read the following for a full, detailed breakdown of how to troubleshoot your issue:

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2...leshooting.aspx

Once you identify the service consuming the CPU by isolating it into its own process, you can use the Services control panel applet to gracefully stop (and restart) the service instead of killing the hosting process, pulling the rug out from under all other hosted services in the same process who are simply victims.