I have a Dell Dimension 4400 running WINDOWS XP Pro, w/ 768 MB RAM & a Radeon 9700 Pro card.

The PC was bought in 2002 and was working fine when I went to sleep on Sunday August 13th. I moved the mouse in the morning on Monday and that's when the problems began:

I get 2 types of error messages. This is the 1st one:

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svchost.exe

The instruction at "0x77c43dbd" referenced memory at "0x41414141". The memory could not be written.
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After clicking the error message off, I can select programs like FireFox, WinWord, etc... but they won't appear, neither will the task manager when I do ctrl-alt-delete.

Soon enough it just locks up and I have to do a hard reboot.

If I reboot I can use the PC normally for a little while and then that same error message will pop up again.

I have no idea why this is occurring because everything was fine until Monday and I did not install, update or do anything between Sunday & Monday.
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Then 2nd type of error is like this:

Here is a PIC of my normal desktop:



After I click off the svchost.exe error the desktop changes the LOOK of the task manager box & the desktop to something like windows 98 style:



Once it gets to that point I can't make anything run.
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This is what the task manager looks like. When I took these pics I was only running Paint Shop Pro, there is a copy of all the running processes:



So, at this point I have 3 svchost.exe running as SYSTEM processes,
1 running as a NETWORK SERVICE
& 1 running as a LOCAL SERVICE
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Basically, PC was working fine through Sunday but now it locks up. Sometimes the lockup takes 20 MINUTES. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes.I am personally going to give you the award for "Most Icons on a Desktop"!

Here's some info from your buddies at Microsoft:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314056

and from elsewhere:

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/svchost.htm

I can't see the top of your processes running there, but something may be taking up a lot more cycles than svchost.

What kind of malware protection is in use?I ran the tasklist /svc command at the prompt and got this:



I'm using both Spybot Search & Destroy & Adaware SE for malware.