I m using XP for the past 4-5 months. It was fast , error-free and smooth.But from the last couple of weeks it has slowed considerably.
especially the boot up time has dramatically increased.(ya, ya i tried bootvis for any improvement)

I checked (with the help of customizerXP) whether there r any hidden startup files and found "svchost.exe" four times in the list .

Does anybody knows what does it do? Is it okay/safe to remove it completely from loading in startup?

Chekc out this page:

http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

svchost.exe is just a single process that actually includes most running windows services. Rather then have all the services show up as single items they are all just included under svchost.

There should be 3 copies of it running in XP, every service started as "Local System" is in one, every service started as "network" and "Local Service" each have thier own svchost as well.

maybe u're infected with lots of spywares/ads... my computer was slow as hell when they were running active.

did you tried lavasoft 'ad aware' ? (yeah i know i'm posting again about it) because it delete all the spywares/ads i had on my computer and now it's just running as smooth as hell !

Hmm I didn't read your post properly.

There shouldn't be any svchost.exe in the startup list.

Try adaware like zanysmash said. and run a up-to-date virus scan on your system as well.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com has ad-aware.

Help !
I have the same svchost.exe running 5 times in the task manager and I don't believe that's normal.
Also my XP is running very slow and I don't know what to do...
Does anybody have the same problem?
Please Help!

I've got four running right now,
and I installed XP 30 minutes ago..
One Local, one network and two system.

? :-?