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Other than what bemildred said, svchost.exe is an essential element in the operating system that allows programs based on .dll libraries to function. It is bound to countless OS functions as well. (Well, you could count them, but it'd take too long.) In my experience, errors with svchost.exe are related either to a virus infection or a corrupted .dll it references or both. If it were one program, my first suspicion would be a bad .dll with that program, and the potential fix would be re-installing it. If it is more than one program, this still could be the problem if all those programs are referencing the same .dll. However, in this case, those programs might be using a .dll that is a part of the OS, and there's not an easy, always-works fix for that other than re-installing the OS. The corruption of the .dll itself could be caused by a bad sector on a hard drive, which might indicate impending failure of the drive.
Less likely, but still possible, is the chance that this is due to a bad memory stick with the software attempting to write to a memory address that returns corrupted data, indicating a memory write failure. That would seem to fit with your error, but the way Windoze reports errors, the simplest, most obvious explanation isn't always or even usually the correct one.
First, do a CTL-ALT-DEL and look at the task list while one of the problem programs is running. You'll see several instances of svchost.exe in the task list. Check the path to each of these instances. If you're running Windows XP, 2000, or 2003, the path should be:
C:\Windows\System32\Svchost.exe
The drive letter could be different if you have the OS installed on a different drive than C:\. Otherwise, the path should be exactly that, with no variation. Make sure the spelling is precise. A common avenue for trojans and viri is a mis-spelling of svchost.exe to something like scvhost.exe or an altered path, etc.
If you happen to be running Windows NT, the path will be:
C:\WinNT\System32\Svchost.exe
If it is something else, you have a virus.
I would immediately run a virus scan, using something other than Norton with an updated virus definitions list. Also do a scandisk to check the integrity of your hard drive. If those come up clean, and you're certain you can trust your anti-virus software, start checking the memory. (If you get to this point, let us know, and I can look up the URL for memtest.) If *that* is clean, it could be a random glitch that hosed one or more .dll files, but I'd still suspect a problem with the hard drive of some sort.
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