I am having problems with svchost.exe on my laptop as it uses, at times, half my RAM (my RAM is quite small at 1G) and completely bogs down my computer making it sluggishly slow and likely to freeze if any programs are attempted to be opened. The highest I’ve seen the memory usage is 550(ish)MB but usually stays between at 300 and 400 MB. Important note: It doesn't seem to use any excess CPU ( which is1.6GHz).....

This thread has some excellet suggestions and links to help diagnose svchost.exe issues.