svchost - hogging memory leading to lockups

Hi all,

My PC has recently started to hang and need a hard reboot. It appears to be because a svchost process is going up to between 700k and 1.1m k memory usage. I can sometimes end process, but not always and that sometimes brings other issues. This happens after booting up. Occasionally it does not happen but mostly it does. Sometimes ending process works others it doesn't.

I have tried looking at the services in the svchost process and ending them, but many say I can't end them and closing the others does not reduce the memory usage.

I also can hear a huge amount of writing to hard disk sometimes when I am having problems.

I have scanned for malware and virus a few times using Malware Bytes and Avast. No real issues found.

I have no applications starting when PC does and have used msconfig to make sure only a very limited amount starts with PC, such as drivers, AV etc.

I don't really want to reinstall Windows or upgrade as I like Win 7.

Any ideas where to go next?

Many thanks

Thanks for taking the time to reply @ThrashZone.

I have checked and automatic updates are off and I have not updated for a very long time (Dec 2012)!

I think I turned this off as I am short on disk space.

What next?