Windows 7 - Conhost exe

I have 26 instances of conhost.exe running at the moment. It's slowing the laptop down. Yesterday there were close to 300 and when it first happened a few days ago there were 240. The only thing I can do is to restart the laptop which clears them for a while.

I have AVG with firewall and Spysweeper automatically running scans every day and they are clear. Today I've also scanned with Spybot and Adaware and neither of them have found anything.

The only thing I can think of is that I installed Dragon Naturally Speaking just before the problems began and when it's started up it scatters icons all over the desktop to clear spaces for itself. That's probably nonsense but I can't think of anything else that's affected the desktop.

Can anyone think of anything more I can try please? It isn't that it's causing problems, apart from the slowness, I can correct it by a simple restart but it's really annoying.

Download and scan with malwarebytes, full scan and updated
It can be a legit process, but there should not be so many.
What is conhost.exe and Why Is It Running? - How-To Geek

One instance is normal, per the above aticle. But 300? Make sure it is not malware by using Malwarbytes. Once that is known, we can move at a slower pace to try and solve the problem

Here is another link indicating that it may be a problem. DO NOT FOLLOW ANY ADVICE GIVEN ON THAT SITE they are trying to sell software.
Just want to show you that it may be a problem
http://www.thestubware.com/def/201008/conhost.php

I've scanned with Malwarebytes and it's found nothing. Thank you for the reply when I looked it up a few days ago I didn't find anything that suggested it was a virus or trojan. I can wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system but I'd rather not if I can avoid it.

Bring up task manager (right click on task bar) and take a screen shot of what is in process.

I'm embarrassed to have to say I have 169 processes running it just isn't possible to take screen shots. I can give you the running processes from the adaware log of today's scan if that will do. There were about 150 then.

What happens if you bring up task manger and right click and then turn off process?

I'm sorry I don't know what you mean by turning off process.

Yes, I do know and I haven't tried that I'll do it now.

It won't let me it says access is denied.

SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker