svchost.exe memory usage up to 4Gb every hour, how to fix?

Question

For some unknown reason, more or less every hour, one of the svchost.exe process (LocalServiceNoNetwork) of my Win 7 takes up to 4Gb of memory ! If I don't manually kill the process it makes the PC freeze for some minutes...

What's strange is that it never happened before, and I did nothing special.

When i have a look at the properties of this process, it says i've got ntdll.dll!rtl user thread start started 8 times. And when it stops everything's normal again.

What's going on and how can i fix this please ? Any help much apreciated. thanks!

Solution 1

In addition to Process Explorer, in Task Manager in Windows 7 you can right click on any of the processes and click "Go To Service(s). This will highlight which services are being run by this process.

Solution 2

It could be a sign of malware, see my post here

Use the "Alternate Method"

Read the "EDIT" section also.

Solution 3

Process Explorer will tell you which services are running in a given svchost.exe process. You can use that information to narrow down the range of services that you need to start/stop to see what is using all of your memory.

Comments

[Breakthrough]

I'll take "Viruses or Malware" for $200, Alex.