I have a svchost.exe process that takes up more memory the longer windows is running, and easily gets up to 20MBs. It's killing me as it's nearly twice as much as explorer itself.

Yes I have 5 running on my XP Home. No big deal for me at 512MB of RAM. To find out what each Startup(or Process) item does or means: Task List Programs

Hi Carraig, Chuck 2, hi everybody, svchost.exe can be two different things: - a generic process used to start several DLL services It scans the content of the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Svchost It's normal to have several! You can type 'tasklist /SVC' in command line to read the services that are running. It is located in C:\Windows\System32 - a malware when located in C:\Windows\System32\Wins and belonging to Welchia or LovSan. You can distinguish b/w both with size, location and date... Have also a look at http://www.computing.net/security/wwwboard/forum/10276.html HTH Have a good day, Gérard from Paris, France

svchost.exe always gets the blame. As Frenchie alluded, do a search for "svchost*.exe". ONLY 1 file should be found. If more than one are found examine the locations of each. The ONLY valid svchost.exe is located in C:\WINNT(Windows)\System32\. All other occurrences are bogus and should be deleted, which may have to be done in safe mode. After deleting any found bogus file run a virus scan. _________________________ The internet is no longer a toy, it's a COMBAT ZONE!