svchost.exe is a service hosting process. It's normal to have 8 to 15 instances of svchost active. It allows most services to crash without making Windows crash. It's then a simple process to restart the affected service(s), that can be done automaticaly and silently without you even be aware that any service crashed.
In some cases, a service can take some time to start, and some services need to wait for another one to start before they can start. Also, in some cases, there is some lenghty setup to be performed.
Defragmenting your drive may hepl if the satrup of a service requires lot of disk access. Get a good third party defragmenter.
You may be low on disk space. Use Ccleaner to clean up left over files cloging your drive.
As Windows XP end of life is rapidly approching, you MUST seriously plan to your transition to Windows 7 or 8.1, or any distribution of Linux.
Electro
December 2013
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Try fixfault.com to fix desktop pcs.