svchost.exe application errors

I had no end of trouble with svchost.exe crashes and read everything
on the damned net to help with it, to no avail. Most resources assumed
I had a virus, which I did not (unless 4 virus checkers were wrong). I
was also behind a hardware firewall with no infected machines on the
LAN. I was completely patched and up to date as of April 2004 on win2k
sp4. When the crashes were happening, Event ID 4097 was not uncommon
in the application log, I was also getting i8042prt errors
periodically (Event ID 28) though those may not be related at all, but
the usual annoyance was the Event ID 26:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Application Popup
Event Category: None
Event ID: 26
Date: 4/8/2004
Time: 6:08:10 PM
User: N/A
Computer: BLAH
Description:
Application popup: svchost.exe - Application Error : The instruction
at "0x1000e765" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could
not be "read".

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

What ultimately eliminated this problem was replacing the disk. 

What ultimately seems to have fixed my frequency (up to 3x per day)
crashes of svchost.exe which required reboots to restore copy/paste
functionality in all programs.... was disabling the Server service in
Control Panel> Admin Tools > Services and setting Server to disabled.

Now Server service disables a few things you should know about. 

I was able to do this because the computer I was having this problem
on (an IBM Thinkpad T23) wasn't sharing out any printers or
folder. Server service also disables computer browser, so really the
only change I needed to make in my usage was to reference file shares
by IP address rather than by netBIOS computer names. In my usage, the
affected machine had no shares of its own, but it accessed shared
files and printers of other windows machines on my home LAN.

So, in summary, try disabling the Server service. Seemed to work for
me.

I hope this helps someone!


Update 9/28/2005: These errors have returned to my life.  Some time
ago, I re-enabled the Server service because I needed to start sharing
my printer on this machine.  Things were managageable for a great
while without too much in the way of svchost.exe application errors.   

However, for no apparent reason, it's back on the uptick just
recently.  I'd come back in the morning and my blank screensaver
password prompt would greet me along with the svchost.exe -
Application Error dialog box.  Frequency of this junk has increased
again to once a day, and now it's been about 5 days in a row. 

I noticed this time that in addtion to losing the ability to cut/paste
between certain applications it appears to render my Lexmark printer
driver inoperative (X6150 multi function machine via USB).  This may
have been the case all along, however, and I just now noticed it. 

My current experiment has focused on 2 instant messaging programs I
had always used -- IBM NotesBuddy (for Lotus Sametime IM servers) and
Trillian Pro.  I've temporarily switched to GAIM with the Meanwhile
plugin to eliminate both of them, and so far I'm crash free for over a
day.  If this doesn't work, I'm going to see if there are Lexmark
driver updates that might help.  It's very frustrating.

Update 2006:

The hard disk on that computer finally died.   A replacement disk and
win2k image does not exhibit this problem.  Ergo, I wonder if subtle
disk errors were causing this instability the whole time?     Hard to
say.  I don't miss those errors--they were a complete pain in my butt! 


Todd H
http://www.toddh.net/