I have one instance of svchost.exe that starts out at 300,000kb , and goes up. The “issue” (that I don't have a problem with) is superfetch sucks up a lot of memory (just to run/index) and it looks like superfetch is the one slurping up your memory.
Photoshop is a huge memory suckmonster, and so is superfetch. I have yet to have a system that won't have my resources strained by both of those. (look at my system stats and compare them to yours).
Both superfetch and Photoshop are (as far as memory, and CPU goes) shopaholics, and you might be cash poor (at 4 gigs and 2x 2.2ghz) depending on what you are doing .
My Photoshop/editing ubber workstation plan is to have a win7 box with 64 gig of memory, and 4 2.8 cores running on fast disk with bittchen graphics cards, supported by some beefy(over 20gb) 8 core (2.6ghz) render nodes. For me, that is what it takes not to be in “bog city”.
If you can't add more memory to your work box, can you place some of those tasks on render nodes?
If you go into a “front line” game factory, the small phoptoshop boxes have what you got, and the artists complain like they are "getting anvilgramed like Wiley E Woyote” if they have to work on anything over NTSC size. In general running photoshop on a laptop (as your stats indicate you have) is just asking for performance issues....