ID:277007
 
I was hosting Faction Wars earlier tonight, and a few hours in, I began recieving reports of lag. What's even more, is that I noticed that DreamSeeker's framerate began dropping.
I went over and looked at my processes list, and found that svchost.exe (A system process) was using ~97% of my CPU's strength (not much. P4 2.53 GHz with a 533 MHz FSB. I can't overclock on this motherboard).

Closing svchost.exe caused winamp to give me sound driver issues, and my computer wouldn't play any sounds.

What the hell can I do to stop svchost from killing my next BYOND hosting session?
Seeing svchost.exe killed your sound perhaps its your sound drivers, maybe reinstalling them or upgrading them would remedy the problem
http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/ processlibrary/svchost/
Could of been a virus...was it under your username or "System"?
In response to Dark_Shadow_Ninja
I stated in my original post that it was a System process, and not a user process. Maybe I was unclear about it. =/
I had the exact same thing happen to me yesterday, but it already happened a few months ago.

svchost.exe regulates the services on NT-based machines. There is one "main" svchost.exe application, which when closed will force your computer to reboot (giving you one minute to save your settings before promptly giving you the finger and reboot). There are some others which can be closed, but this will also close some services on your PC.

On my instance, the exact same svchost.exe was causing the problem. My sound also failed, but I happen to know why: the service "Windows Audio" was bound to that svchost.exe. All you have to do is hit startmenu / run, type "services.msc", run it, and then look for "Windows Audio" and re-enable it.

Warning: It seems that this particular svchost.exe also likes to bind itself to Zero Configuration tools for certain wireless adaptors. This happened with me a few minutes earlier (I didn't shut the PC down or anything like that) and my wireless adapter needed to check it's connection with my router but failed because the zero configuration tool was shutdown. If that is the case, just restart it and you should have your 'net status back online! =)
In response to Android Data
Android Data wrote:
I had the exact same thing happen to me yesterday, but it already happened a few months ago.

svchost.exe regulates the services on NT-based machines. There is one "main" svchost.exe application, which when closed will force your computer to reboot (giving you one minute to save your settings before promptly giving you the finger and reboot).

http://epicxp.ytmnd.com/