Hello, I have a question about the entry svchost.exe in task manager. I recently upgraded to xp and I was wondering how you can be sure that it's not a virus. I tryed deleting all three entries, but when I get to the last entry a clock with a timer comes on saying it's going to shut the computer down in a minute. I downloaded the 15 day trial of norton anti virus and when I do a scan nothing comes up. But the thing is I have noticed some things different about the startup screen. Sometimes it will give me the chance to log off other times it will just shut down. I did a complete reformat with the XP upgrade cd, the same one I used when I installed XP the first time, There isn't any way a virus could still be there and if there is how can I find out for sure if I have one or don't.

There is a virus with a similar (or same) name. I read the virus sits in a different folder to the correct file.

Yea it's related to the blaster worm. I am afraid I might have the worm but my trial version of norton says evrything's ok. Am I being paronoid? I wish I new a sure fire way to test for it. Thank's

RAV does not miss anything, if it says you're clean better believe YOU ARE CLEAN !! BTW there are a host of free AV programs out there for frugal folks. B4 you criticize a bigger man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you're a mile away, and you have his shoes.

I ran it and as I waited nervously, it came up system clean! Thank You, I plan on buying a copy of Mcaffe. If anyone knows a better anti-virus than mcaffe, for xp please let me know. Thank's, John

Good choice with McAfee, as far as I'm concerned. I'd avoid the overly bloated, resource hog Norton. It is very problematic for many; if you browse some of the posts, you'll agree. Take care... ~Tommyo

I agree with Sabertooth, your clean. Svchost.exe is a generic process that serves other processes. It's useally futile to kill these processes because any real programs are only using it for their own purposes. Scvhost.exe is W32/Agobot-S Trojan horse virus and network worm. It spreads through P2P sharing. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.