Windows – What Services Can Be Safely Disabled?

Soluto should do the trick - Its an application meant for measuring and optimising start up times. You can select the 'pause' option to load a startup item when needed, and the delay option to delay a startup entry.

This article seems to state its a registry hack, but dosen't actually say what entries need editing - so this may be another option.

Not sure if the following will solve your problem, but maybe help you get part of the way to a solution if nothing else...

The Symantec Management Client is most likely the issue (I used to contract for them and have seen similar issues).

If this is your home computer, then go to Start and type in msconfig in the Run box (where it says "Search Programs and Files") and hit enter.

System Configuration will open. Click on the Startup tab.

Uncheck the Symantec products then click "Apply" and restart.

Look at your svchost processes again and see if any are hogging the processor time.

If no improvement, go back into System Configuration and recheck the items you unchecked.

At this point, the svchost process that is complaining is probably associated with a web monitoring component, so I would temporarily disable that component and see if the process hogging continues.

If still unresolved, an excellent freeware-for-personal-use utility for examining processes in detail is IARSN TaskInfo. BTW, one of the few utilities I have paid for because it is so darn useful.

After installing, go into the help menu and activate the product, then restart as Administrator (the long button in the upper-right-hand corner).

Examine the hogging svchost.exe process and look in the lower right panel for the files it has opened, etc. so you can get more clues as how to proceed.

In general, I highly recommend looking for something less aggressive and with a better track record than the Symantec product line but that is just my personal opinion.

Hope that helps, ClaireW