Dear CNET members,

Happy Friday! Today's question is from James, who asks what svchost.exe is and why it is sucking up all his Windows system CPU resources. This is a popular question, and it has come up quite often in e-mails to me. Even within the discussion for this week's topic, you find that many other folks using Windows XP and Vista mentioned that they have also experienced or are currently experiencing this issue.

While there were many explanations by our members as to what svchost process is, the two articles that were recommended by our members that I found most helpful in explaining this whole bit were not from Microsoft's support site, but from the How-To Geek Web site "What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?" article and "Stop svchost.exe from stealing CPU cycles" from the CNET download blog by our own CNET staff writer Peter Butler. These cleared up things quickly.

After reading the articles and all the shared experiences by our members of how to eliminate these issues with svchost.exe, I realized that the svchost.exe process could be caused by multiple programs on your system--ranging from firewalls, printer programs, and burning software to software update services. So while high CPU cycles can all point to svchost.exe, it's not svchost that is the problem, but ultimately the underlying software, service, or even a possible virus/spyware that is causing that instance of SVCHOST to run so much. And the best way to eliminate some of these processes is to narrow it down to the worst offenders and eliminate them. One program that many members recommended to help discover these offending process is to use Process Explorer version 11.33, which will help break all the svchost.exe processes down in details, so that you can find those programs or updating services and stop them. Check out some of the featured member answers to get you going. Good luck on the discovery of those offenders and if you have any additional tips you'd like to share about svchost.exe, please join us in this week's discussion. Thanks everyone for your help on this!

Cheers!
- Lee

Got suggestions? Send me an e-mail: messageboards@cnet.com

Featured member solutions
for last week's question:

 "Possible Solution on 100 Percent CPU Utilization "
-- Submitted by: gwiljr

 "100 percent CPU usage caused by SVCHOST process "
-- Submitted by: callmebond

 "Check your system thoroughly for viruses and adware "
-- Submitted by: darrenforster99

 "Here's the solution "
-- Submitted by: chazzsubscribe

 Read all member contributions

 Thanks to all who contributed!