Sometimes when I play a song, it plays through with no problems, but after, one of the multiple svchost.exe's running will jump up to 99% CPU usage for about 30 seconds to a minute afterwards. It doesn't completely freeze up my computer, but its still using 99 CPU and about 50,000-60,000k memory. Ive heard of media files with viruses, but I regularly scan with multiple programs, so I highly doubt thats the case. Anyone know of this problem?
If you have an HP computer, (maybe other makes as well), you will probably have a process running from start-up called "kbd.exe".
I was experiencing the same as you some time last year, and the cause was kbd.exe reacting with one of the svchost.exe's and maxing out the CPU.
kbd.exe is a process from Logitech which allows you to configure the additional keys on their multimedia keyboard products. This is a non-essential process. Disabling or enabling it is down to user preference.
Try disabling it, to see if it's the culprit, or, leave things as they are, and when it happens again, open task manager, Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and stop it running. You soon find out if it is the cause.
No, my computer I built, so it has no useless system processes from companies. This is not a constant problem either, and it happens randomly, whether my computer has been on 5 mins or 5 hours.
Next time it happens, launch the task manager quickly, and see if anything else is sucking up CPU resource at the same time as svchost.exe.
If you've already done that, maybe there will be something in the Event Viewer to give you a clue.
Right click My Computer > Manage> Event Viewer, and check for any errors at the time you had the problem. Check everything, AntiVirus, Applications, System.
I've no idea if this problem will show up anything in the Event Viewer, but for want of any better ideas, it's worth a try.
EDIT: Which media player are we talking about here?
I like System Explorer but I do not select it to replace Task Manager:
http://systemexplorer.mistergroup.org
The Monitoring Process tab produces a nice graph of what application is active and how much system resources are being consumed.
I have not seen a svchost.exe jump up in usage when using Media Player though.