task manager shows extra cmd.exe/conhost/explorer - why?

I leave my Win7 pro machine running from 8am to about midnight every day and when it's off, it was done so by Start->Sleep (for quick boot time). Sometimes I'll have cause to go into the task manager and despite having no visible CMD windows or explorer windows (or perhaps just one), I'll see anything from 2 to 10 explorers, maybe 5 cmd.exe instances and a similar number of conhost.exe instances.

I've done a full restart this morning and gone through most of the programs I use during the day and seen that none of them open such a weird bunch of mystery unknown processes.

When it does happen, I don't go into the task manager because I've noticed any performance hit or anything, I just wanted to kill a specific task (or just check it's not there) and that's when I spot the extras. Killing each explorer instance with "end process" causes none of my programs to complain, so I don't know how they got there. Also, they are active, they've got some CPU Time racked up. Same deal when closing the cmd/conhosts, nothing complains "hey you closed my cmd!".

If I right-click on any of the cmd/conhost/windows processes and choose "open file location", it always takes me to C:\Windows so that's no help at all.

I'm trying to find out (a) who's opening them, and (2) what they're doing and where they're doing it.

In case anyone thinks I might be bot-infested, I'm behind two firewalls, have avast and spybot running, and have run malware bytes scan also. As far as I can tell, all is clean.

VistaKing said:

I don't see any attachments .

Sorry, you must have looked just as I was editing my response. I believe I found the culprit now (and it wasn't anything that would be in those attachments so I deleted them).