At the last count I had 6 svchost.exe instances active.(2 Local Services, 2 Network Services and 2 System) I know that svchost can cover a multitude of sins, but I am running XP Home, which doesn't have the command line tasklist /svc available so I cannot see exactly what services are running underneath.
I have run both AVG and Norton to check for virus infection with no result. I have used three different registry scanners, again with no result.
I have used Adaware (pro) to check for anything and again the system sees to be clean.
I have checked ports for any outgoing traffic and there does not seem to be anything untoward on that front.
I have an HP Pavillion laptop with a Celeron 1.3MHz processor (yeah I know
) 60Gb disk and 2Gb of RAM