svchost.exe (Local Service) eating my RAM!

Thanks Kado for the advice. After further searching I discovered that the required trick is to right click on the iso rescue file in Windows Explorer and select 'Opens with - Windows Disc Image Burner'. This then burns a bootable CD! Previously I had left clicked and selected 'Burn' from the Windows Explorer bar. This does not produce a bootable CD. So now everything works, but boot time off a USB stick is so much faster than off a CD that there really is no sense in not going the USB route, apart from cost, of course.

Despite all these initial problems I really am delighted with Macrium Reflect and have been able to make multiple image backups of both of my machines. It really is vastly better than the Ghost product I used to use (although that had its place at on one time). With my 2TB Seagate USB3 drive connected to the Dell I am able to achieve continuous write speeds of 950Mb/s so imaging is much faster than I had expected - all very good. I can (so far) recommend this disc drive. My thanks to you and Callender for recommending Macrium which has challenged me to get on and do something I have been putting off for ages.

Now I can get back to the original task of draining the swamp (i.e. fixing my memory leak) now I have what I believe are secure backups.

After email support from Macrium it turns out that applying the latest BIOS update to my Dell fixes the CD writer problem. Rather unexpected as the optical drive worked fine and passed all tests. Anyway, one more defect fixed!

I really do seem to be fated! After all this hard work I uninstalled IE10 (took me back to IE8) and then worked forward to IE9. Memory leak looked to be fixed (good). But then disaster, IE10 fails to install, with an error code 9C59, which many others seemed to have experienced but not resolved. At least I have Macrium backup but I am not sure what good it can do me now! Totally gutted.

Out of sheer desperation and stubbornness I tried installing IE11 (which I had intended to get onto after IE10 was proven). This was extremely slow to install (fighting with some problem, maybe?) but eventually it made it! I cannot explain any of this but am about to do a Macrium backup pronto!

Everything seems so difficult these days! I bought two new USB sticks off eBay and started to use them today, but they turned out to need magic Macrium incantations said over them to make them work as rescue discs! (refer to how to prep a USB drive as a rescue disc in Macrium Help). All OK now but a few more hours I will never see again. And as for setting up the BIOS on my ProBook to boot off a USB stick - don't even ask! - it is so non-intuitive that you need the official user manual to do anything.

But I am grateful to have got somewhere. I just hope the memory leak hasn't returned.

Fair comment, but not being one to give up easily I have battled on with, I think, success .

After reinstalling IE11 I was still experiencing the memory leak (!!) so as a last resort I committed to trying the two relevant Microsoft Hotfixes KB2847346 and KB2950358. The latter gave a 'not required' message but the latter installed correctly and seems to have fixed the problem :). There is still some very small creep in memory usage by svchost.exe (LocalService) over days, but this may well be normal as I have not previously been monitoring that closely. Certainly the system is now usable.

Clearly all is not perfect with my system and a rebuild would be nice, but I need to plan this rather than just rush into it. I'm thinking of getting a new hard disc for this and starting afresh from my restore discs, but am not yet sure how Windows 7 licencing will work.

Thanks again for the advice to use Macrium Reflect. I accidently damaged my HP ProBook build a few days ago whilst experimenting with installing old scanner software and System Restore refused to work (!!), but I was able to copy back the affected disc partitions with Macrium from the backup image I made last week and all is now well again!