When you’re troubleshooting Windows XP problems, one of the tools you likely use is the Windows Task Manager. By design, Task Manager provides detailed information about the programs and processes that are running on a system.

When you first launch Task Manager (by pressing [Ctrl][Shift][Esc] and clicking the Task Manager button), it opens to the Applications tab, which shows you a list of all of the currently running applications. However, switching to the Processes tab shows that there are many more processes running than there are applications.

One of the processes that you’ll find in this list is Svchost.exe. In fact, you’ll likely see several Svchost.exe processes listed.

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services run from dynamic link libraries (DLLs). If you want to quickly uncover which services are running under each of the Svchost.exe processes, you can use a command-line utility called TaskList, along with one of its special parameters.

Follow these steps:

Open a command prompt (Start->Run Type Cmd.exe).
Type tasklist /svc, and press [Enter].

Related topics:
Take Control Over Your Process
Know Your Processes