svchost.exe Memory Leak

Hello friends, I am looking for some urgent help regarding svchost.exe on my Windows XP system. Since past couple of weeks I am noticing the svchost.exe process is eating up more than 70K of memory when I restart the computer but if I leave it for about 4 to 5 hours, it reaches upto 120-320k and slow down my pc. In this slower state when I right click any file the context menu appears after 30 to 40 seconds. It show down my system that much.

The only way to fix it out is restart. Does anyone of you have come across this problem ever? Any help would be appreciated.

Can you tell me what is the actual version of your Windows ? I mean, XP Pro, XP home or else? Also what all services are running in the background? I am asking this because to me it seems like the Indexing service is running, it's a memory hog.

Until you reply, try out the following. If it is XP Pro, then open command prompt and run the following command: tasklist /svc. See what happens. If you are using XP Home then this command will not work.

Apart from this i will suggest you to check the following MS KB describing Windows XP may run slowly and you may see multiple symptoms in Windows Task Manager: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/899869

Hello MSFT. Did you recently ran Windows Update after which the problem started? According to you post it seems like maybe the sixth or seventh about a runaway svchost. I have read some post where a person facing the problem was able to fix the issue by renaming the svchost file. Since then
someone told me that if you rename the file, windows silently recreates it. Hope it helps you as well.