How might I go about diagnosing the cause of a svhost process that consumes vast amounts of RAM and CPU on a Windows 7 system? It appears apparently randomly, it can be terminated without any problems, but can often pop up a few minutes later (or several hours). It apparently does nothing useful: certainly nothing essential. System scans for viruses have turned up nothing.
I've lived with this inconvenience for a few months now, but a cure, or the means by which a cure could be arrived at, would be great.
The massive drops in the CPU (green) and RAM (blue) are associated with the killing of the process tree.
I sometimes notice flickering and graphical changes in windows briefly after terminating the svhost process.
UPDATE:
After the advice of Moab I waited until the svhost reappeared and took a screenshot of its processes (non-highlighted are irrelevant if I'm reading it correctly). Interestingly they all seem to be network based. Perhaps Windows Update is the root of the problem?
