For programs having at least one window, End Task does the same as clicking the X "Close" button – it sends the WM_CLOSE
message to that window, asking it nicely to close. (For console windows, the equivalent is CTRL_CLOSE_EVENT
.) The program can prompt the user to save changes, or do various cleanup tasks. If the process complies, Task Manager waits a few seconds and proceeds with terminating the process if it is still running.
If the process is frozen or otherwise not handling window messages it receives, then, of course, neither End Task nor the Close button can work. In those cases, Windows will usually ask you to end the program forcefully, but only after giving the program sufficient time to respond.
Meanwhile, the End Process button does not concern itself with tasks or windows – it calls the TerminateProcess()
function and Windows destroys the process immediately, without notifying it or giving it any chance to clean up.
(Resources such as memory are released automatically once the process is gone; however, there might remain various temporary files if the program created them, and of course there's the risk of data corruption if the process is terminated in the middle of saving data.)
See also:
According to wikipedia:
In the Windows NT family of operating systems, svchost.exe (Service
Host, or SvcHost) is a system process which hosts multiple Windows
services. Its executable image, %SystemRoot%\System32\Svchost.exe
or %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\Svchost.exe (for 32-bit services running on
64-bit systems) runs in multiple instances, each hosting one or more
services. It is essential in the implementation of so-called shared
service processes, where a number of services can share a process in
order to reduce resource consumption.
So, is expected that you have a lot of Windows processes running over a svhost.exe. Many of them just use TCP/IP ports(sockets) to inter-processes comunication over localhost. That's why you can see a lot of network traffic over svhost.exe.
Additionally you could also find which Windows Service is running over svhost. I run "tasklist /svc" command on my computer and it returned me the dependencies between svhost and some running Windows Services:
Best Answer
I've written a lengthy explanation of what this process is, and how to figure out what each one of them does.
The bottom line is that svchost is a process that contains all of the Windows services. Since there are many Windows services, there are also many instances running.
What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running?
The easiest way to check on these is to use Process Explorer: