Conhost.exe cannot be terminated from Task Manager at system reboot

Every time I reboot my Win 7 Pro, I have high system resources and disk usage for at least 5 minutes. Looking into the problem I find that, using task manager, there's a conhost.exe running. I cannot terminate this task from the task manager window. However, if I go into Resources, from Task Manager, I find the only way to terminate this task is by terminating the task tree.

Is there any way I can find what process triggers this program at start up? I wouldn't think a conhost.exe running immediately at start up and using high system resources would be a good thing!

Thanks for the link.

I can see the way it works and usually, in the past, conhost only ran when some other program (like BOINC) used it. Then, if BOINC ended its process, I could terminate conhost directly from the Task Manager without any problem.

However, in this case, conhost is running at start up and using vast memory and HDD resources for up to 5 minutes or so. Ans in this case, I can't terminate it from Tast Manager. I have to go through the Resource Monitor and terminate the task tree. I cannot see what resources conhost is using at this point either.

This just started up a week or so ago and I'm told that conhost running could also be a bad thing as a rootkit, malware, or virus could be using it. So far, MalwareBytes and Norton 2013 have come up clean so I'm at a loss as to why this is running so soon after system boot.

I've tried to look for the 'tree' but conhost does not return anything. Is there anything else out there that would let me see the tree so I can maybe figure out what's triggering it?

Thanks. I will look forward to what they have to say.

Yes, it looks like it's coming from the system 32 folder (I'm running 64 bit Win 7 Pro).

Sorry this is taking so long. I've been working long hours and the only time I'll have to do this is tomorrow evening (Wednesday the 2nd). Will post the data then.