Member Avatar for tshooter

Playing games is what I like to do on my system. It has never been connected to the internet until recently to play games online. After I did that I noticed svchost.exe and system was taking 100% of my cpu. What is going on? What can I do to get rid of this so everything can run a lot smoother?

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svchost.exe is just the Windows host process that runs many services at once; multiple instances are normal. When one instance consumes all CPU the real problem is the service(s) inside that instance, or a driver/hardware fault, not the host process itself.

A safe triage sequence that avoids guessing: temporarily isolate the machine from the network and reboot to see whether the load stops; boot to a minimal (safe) environment next to check whether nonessential drivers or services are involved; review the System and Application event logs for repeating service or driver errors that line up with the CPU spikes. These steps separate network‑triggered problems from local corruption or driver failures.

To pinpoint the culprit without repeating earlier suggestions here, use an autorun/startup inspector to list service and scheduled‑task entry points, and capture a short live trace that logs registry, file and network activity for the offending svchost PID. A brief netstat -ano snapshot can map open network endpoints to that PID. Confirm the svchost executable is the real Windows binary by checking its file path and digital signature; an svchost running from the wrong folder or without a proper signature is suspicious.

If the trace points to corruption rather than infection, run the system file checker and schedule a disk check to repair damaged system files and sectors. If infection is suspected, prefer an up‑to‑date offline or rescue scan and a second‑opinion scanner run from a clean environment. Update NIC and chipset drivers and remove recently added peripherals or software that coincide with the start of the problem. Do not terminate svchost instances at random; that can stop RPC, networking or printing and force reboots.

Several replies here raised worms, update‑related causes and a USB/HID service as possibilities (see posts by , , and ). Those leads are common; the checks above cover additional angles that help narrow the root cause.

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All 14 Replies

Member Avatar for PlatinumRik

you may want to check if you have the blaster virus.

Rick

Member Avatar for )BIG"B"Affleck

There is a similar post called the same thing search for it in the windows forum I think your post has been already answered(suggestion) Hit www.daniweb.com and look at the bottom of the HOTTEST threads list.(its one of my favorites)

Member Avatar for WiseBobo

If a person does not have the blaster worm, yet Svchost.exe is still giving you problems when you attempt to play any game, downloading the remover tool for blaster is not going to help one bit.

I myself am a gamer, it is what I do. I can't play sports because I royally screwed my knee earlier this summer and am still doing rehab.

There has got to be another reason as for why svchost.exe is hogging up all of the CPU and yet there are no viruses on a computer. It is happening to me, as well as alot of other people as far as I can see, and the problem is not limited to blasterworm. There has got to be another solution to another problem. And I am not about to end system processes that force my computer to restart in T-MINUS 60 seconds, because as it already is, my PC is not the most stable one in the world; sometimes even my HD talks to me. <<<< disk error.

Member Avatar for )BIG"B"Affleck

QUOTE:By someone UBER my boy CATCHIn the computer world there is a answer for every computer problem simple as that....

Member Avatar for xidarian

I have the same problem on a comp. and ,y virus scan doesn't work properly. To make a long story short i found a way to scan and found a worm but when i downloaded the patch for that it it said i wasn't infected. so i did searching on the svchost.exe process that showed up 4 times. it was takeing all remaining processor cycles. I found it is a process of the worm agobot.s


Hope this helps,
The Xidarian

Member Avatar for PlatinumRik

on the command line run the command 'tasklist /svc'
this will break down for you what each process is being used for.

Member Avatar for tigAAa

finally a like to say that some of you have the welchia worm and some of you have a blast worm... so look at symantecs to get the needed remove-tool

Member Avatar for camelNotation

I don't think so.I think it's the agobot -s worm.I ran my removal tools for nachi,welchia and blaster but it's diff.u should also give agobot a try because I can't remember which one of them actually sends data packets to ur isp.

Member Avatar for xeroxss

Get the patch for the blaster worm it works for me. Then update your systems after, that so that you can minimize your headache for Windows 2K/XP.

Member Avatar for hobbes

I have the same problem, but I don't think it's a virus. It started today. I was running a bit torrent download over night while I had some batch video encoding going as well. Sometime about 10 minutes after I left, both the bit torrent download and the encode froze (I know this from the encoding log). When I got back to it this morning, I noticed that my CPU usage was maxxed out and that it only returned to normal when I ended the bit torrent exe. I restarted then because a few things weren't working properly. When I was back in windows, my cpu jumped to max after I logged in and it was because of svchost.exe. I ended it and the error telling me that the RPC buffer had been broken came up so I'd have to shutdown came up. By the way, you can get past having to shutdown by typing 'shutdown /a' in a command promt.

Anyways, I have Norton Antivirus with my definitions up to date and it hasn't detected a virus lately. I also have a router so the blaster worm wouldn't be affecting me. However, Norton Antivirus doesn't work now. It appears that it's working, but it doesn't actually do anything. I can't change any of the options, the system status never actually refreshes, and I can't scan for viruses. I don't think that it's possible for a virus to come in on part of a bit torrent download and infect a system without being executed either.

So does anyone know what this could be outside of a virus? I could run the windows system restore and just go back to two days ago, but I don't know that I trust it entirely because of other recent experiences with "helpful" automated microsoft utilities.

Member Avatar for JiGsta

Member Avatar for Brian Rayment

Playing games is what I like to do on my system. It has never been connected to the internet until recently to play games online. After I did that I noticed svchost.exe and system was taking 100% of my cpu. What is going on? What can I do to get rid of this so everything can run a lot smoother?

Hi I have had the same prob,,,,u may find that this will work It worked for me

Member Avatar for evolve2explore

Playing games is what I like to do on my system. It has never been connected to the internet until recently to play games online. After I did that I noticed svchost.exe and system was taking 100% of my cpu. What is going on? What can I do to get rid of this so everything can run a lot smoother?

I just spent an hour with Microsoft Technical Support - what resolved my problem through trial and error of unchecking services in msconfig - was to go into msconfig, services, and see if HID Input Services is checked. Stands for Human Interface Display. Uncheck it and reboot. It worked for me after days of trying to figure out what was going on with svchost.exe!

Member Avatar for DBenway

SvcHost.exe using 100% CPU (processor) on a Windows XP SP2 machine:

Running “Tasklist /Svc” from a command line will show the instances of SvcHost.exe and what is running under each instance of SvcHost.exe (there should be about 5 instances of SvcHost.exe running on an XP SP2 machine).

You can go into the Registry and see all the things running under SvcHost.exe by looking in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ SvcHost .

The way I found and fixed this problem was by downloading Process Explorer (from SysInternals, which is now owned by Microsoft). It showed me that WuAuClt.exe was running under the instance of SvcHost.exe that was gobbling up my entire processor. WuAuClt.exe is the Windows Update Automatic Update Client.

After doing some web searching, I found that in many cases the problem is because of Microsoft Update (Microsoft Update handles all MS products, whereas Windows Update handles only the Windows OS). To turn off Microsoft Update, go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com, choose “Change settings” on the left hand side of the page, then at the bottom of the page choose “Disable Microsoft Update”.

Please also look at MS KB article KB916089 for some related information that may be helpful. I downloaded this hot fix and it made no difference on my system.

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