Svchost and Wuauclt murdering my computer

someday2010

For the last months or so my computer has been ridiculously slow when I turn it on and for about 20 minutes afterwards. I brought up windows task manager and it shows Svchost and wuauclt absorbing massive amounts of memory.

Is it a virus? It makes my computer pretty much unusable for the first 10 to 20 minutes after startup

Neuro

If you're computer is:

- running Windows XP,
- has Service Pack 3 (SP3 installed), and
- has a modest amount of memory (less than 1024MB)

your problem is not due to a virus or other malware, but a bug in the Windows Update AutoUpdate Client (wuauclt.exe). A large number of people have been reporting the same issue in the last few weeks (see this thread on Microsoft Answers).

The current official workaround as detailed in the above thread is as follows:
1. Open Internet Explorer, and visit http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate
2. In the left menu, click Change Settings.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and check the option to Disable Microsoft Update software and let me use Windows Update Only, then click Apply changes now.

This should solve your problem.