Multitasking operating systems run a bunch of stuff all the time... so much so that it may be difficult to know which processes you actually want running. The obfuscation of all this stuff benefits virus and spyware authors, as they can run their dirty little programs mostly unnoticed. Because spyware is so prevalant today, people are starting to look at what's actually running in their Task Manager. You may have become suspicious of a program called "svchost.exe". There are usually several of them running at the same time, and look like they could be a hijacked program or under the influence of other spyware. So what is svchost, and what can you do about it?