Windows XP gurus - SVCHost - DPChallenge Forums

Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM

03/02/2007 03:27:03 AM · #1

OK, I've spent about 25 hours googling this and can't seem to find anything. I know that there are plenty of XP whizzes around here, so if that's you and you wouldn't mind lending a hand, it would be appreciated.

I run AVG and zone alarm and spybot resident protection, and I'm pretty much 100% positive that I am not infected with any nasties. (I've done a moderate amount of manual virus fighting, so wouldn't consider myself a novice in this area) I am fully updated with genuine windows xp for tablet.

But I have been having untold amounts of irritation with an odd little SVCHOST.exe in my processes that keeps getting out of control... just a few minutes ago, it was up around 130MB allocated, jumping back and forth between 90+MB every few seconds... especially since picking up IE 7.0. Recently, my IE seems to be failing a lot more than it ought to, locking up for no reason and soaring up to 50-60MB allocated and more...

I've manually searched through my entire services list via the system tools and have found nothing amiss.

Further, I have also started to encounter the 'hanging boot' problem that I have seen lots of people asking about but have not seen any answers. Generally this is described as the system will boot to a certain point, where it gets to either explorer.exe or ctfmon.exe and will simply chill out for 1-5 minutes at very low CPU activity. I have corrected by killing explorer.exe or CTFMON.exe and restarting manually, but these often generate imperfect boots with some things not working right.

Any ideas?

THANKS!

crayon

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1

03/02/2007 03:35:16 AM · #2

info on svchost

since it is not a virus (you said you scanned) then i suggest you find a good memory managing program to prevent it from hogging up resources (it shouldn't, if working correctly)

Message edited by author 2007-03-02 03:37:11.

Simms

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

03/02/2007 03:37:18 AM · #3

Double check the spelling isnt SCVHOST.EXE which was a guise a virus took a little while back, it `hid` itself in the processes by havent the slight different spelling.. I cant see any of the more up-to-date AV software missing it, but always worth a check.

03/02/2007 03:40:50 AM · #4

Nope checked that. I started getting a bit irritated about the time when I cleaned a friend's computer that had the rundl132.exe trojan a few weeks ago. They were also experiencing similar troubles with hanging boots, but this was more because of a terribly messy system and I was able to clean this up without much effort. Her system now boots 15 seconds faster than it did when it was new.

Crayon, thanks for the link. I had actually read through that quite early on in my vain quest.. ;) do you have any recommendations for memory management programs?

Message edited by author 2007-03-02 03:44:24.

crayon

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1

03/02/2007 03:52:15 AM · #5

Originally posted by eschelar:

Crayon, thanks for the link. I had actually read through that quite early on in my vain quest.. ;) do you have any recommendations for memory management programs?

i dont have that problem so i dont use any memory managers. but then again, maybe we are tackling this the wrong way. have you checked what loads/starts each time your computer boots? try msconfig at the Run box. i usually run only the bare essentials, eg. on computers that doesnt print, i disable print and spool services. speaking of services, check what service starts auto, and selectively disable those you dont need. hope this is a good lead towards the source of your problem with svchost, because after all, svchost is merely a service/process starter.

anyway: this quick find may help to some degree, i think?

03/02/2007 04:18:29 AM · #6

thanks guy.

I have actually been through my msconfig lists and running processes lists a few times. I just went through again and it's still clean.

No idea what's going on.

Will have a look at that little memory manager. I used RAMBooster for a few weeks once, but it didn't have the ability to maintain memory levels. I will see what free-RAM can do. hopefully I can set an exception to cooperate with the 850MB that I have set photoshop to allow itself.

crayon

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1

03/02/2007 04:31:05 AM · #7

Originally posted by eschelar:

Will have a look at that little memory manager. I used RAMBooster for a few weeks once, but it didn't have the ability to maintain memory levels. I will see what free-RAM can do. hopefully I can set an exception to cooperate with the 850MB that I have set photoshop to allow itself.

good luck. but a word of caution on using these free-memory utilities. if you set it too aggressively, it may slow down your running applications because they would have been moved to virtual memory by that over-ambitious utility ;) but you already know this, dont you.

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF-ED

03/02/2007 05:04:05 AM · #8

:) yup. That's why RAMBooster didn't make the cut. It could only really be used when I needed more RAM rather than being a true realtime memory manager.

admajic

Nikon D50

03/02/2007 06:42:44 AM · #9

run adaware by lavasoft and spy bot search & destroy and see what they find?

Nikon AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

03/02/2007 07:10:30 AM · #10

thank you. Have done. Both are installed with resident protection and I regularly reboot to safe mode to run scans... usually every 2 months or so... (sorry didn't mention the ad aware earlier) I did this last about 2 weeks ago in an attempt to work around the sloggy boot times.

*grumble*

Next time, I buy a Dell, who at least will sell you a copy of the boot disks for WinXP for about 10 bucks (my roommate bought a Dell and at my suggestion was able to obtain WinXP after he thought it was too late) and then at least I could customize it properly. This computer has never been a real screamer for bootups.

EDIT: FreeRAM seems to be doing a nice job and is nicely customizable however it is unable to give me exceptions like for PS. I don't see a major problem though as it is possible to set up a button in the taskbar to clean up RAM. Seems to be keeping the SVCHost.exe somewhat in check. It's at 70 MB right now. Seems pretty high. My current RAM load is around 400MB which does seem a bit high compared to 220MB off a clean boot. I've got about 70MB of tablet apps running in RAM (Tabtip.exe and TCServer.exe) in addition to two tabs open in IE 7.0.

I will do a reboot now to see how it goes.

Message edited by author 2007-03-02 07:16:54.

David.C

03/02/2007 07:14:35 AM · #11

As I understand it, SVCHost doesn't really do anything on its own, it just acts as a packager for various services you have installed. Any memory use (beyond the little always needed by the SVChost.exe) is most likely being used by the service, not SVChost.

Checking the list of services running on your system would be a good step to take -- stopping each in turn.

David