I've been experiencing issues with ccsvchst hogging both HDD and CPU resources on my notebook. The HDD light is steady CPU usage is high and the SYSTEM version just seems to keep growing in memory size. This is an older 32 bit system so I do not have a lot of memory overhead which is why everything pretty much comes to a screeching to a halt until it is finished.
I saw one answer which suggested just going into Task Manager and shutting down the process there, but is that really safe to do?
Don't just stop the service (it may not even let you anyway, since it's probably protected from being stopped (by malware)).
It's Norton's anti-virus or 360 or something, so yo should be able to (temporarily) disable it via the program's UI.
Norton (especially older versions) are notoriously resource hungry. My advise would be to uninstall Norton (which is what that service is from) and replace it with a more current, and lighter-weight protection solution.
Related SU question: Why is csrss.exe and ccsvchst.exe thrashing my hard drive for up to 45 minutes at a time?
