Trouble shooting

[bradrobert]

Can anyone tell me if disabling certain svchost.exe processes will help my drop out and pop problem during recording. If so, which ones should I disable?
Will rebooting turn them back on?

[oretez]

probably not remotely & rebooting can turn them back on

It is possible that 'Svchost' is causing problems. Troubleshooting can be non trivial.

Svchost is a Host for services, some can be essential some can be malware exploits. There are typically several instances of Svchost running each will contain a variety of 'dll's', some are essential, some are simply bloat, some can negatively impact audio performance. Each system will have different processes (dll's) contained in a variety of Scvhst's, so remotely, without direct access to you system, there is no way to determine which processes can be safely deleted. XP pro has a tool available to see what is in each Svchost

From the Start menu access [Run], type 'CMD.EXE' in the dialog box, when the black screen pops up type: [tasklist/svc>c:\tasklist.txt]; (without the brackets)

It then helps if you can print this out so you can research each listed 'dll' and see which you can live without. Of course in any given host there are likely to be some you need some you don't so this approach can be time consuming.

Assuming you don't have debilitating malware (assuming OP has already done the anti-malware diagnostic) you can still have 'memory leakage' or CPU cycle lock problem from software that does not seem to cause problems for a lot of tasks but will cause problems for high stress apps (audio production for example). Not all applications 'release' memory appropriately. The so called memory leak problem. There are a variety of readily available freeware tools for monitoring mem & CPU usage, correlating it to specific processes (google search should turn up a selection of more titles then you could possibly try).

Depending on whether something like this is your problem, it is seldom sufficient to merely 'stop' a process. Typically the quickest way to sidestep the issues is to uninstall offending apps If they are ones you can't live without, finding ways to temporarily cripple them, when you are in audio production mode, is the next best thing .

Additionally these kind of issues are typically 'systems problems', i.e. Related to how all the components interact. You could have two nearly identical systems, on one things work great, on the other persistent irritating problems.

That said prior to delving into trouble shooting background processes (other then running standard anti-malware protection, which you don't want to be actively running when you are in audio production mode, as they tend to be significant resource hogs and by their very function tend to interfere with audio production) I'd review all the standard performance issues with trying to do audio on general purpose computers: dedicated Drive for audio, make sure all drives are operating DMA, keep any audio temp files off system drive, don't allow OS to dynamically resize page file, make sure audio drive is fast enough and not crippled by file fragmentation, shut down all system sounds and disable all sounds used by all software, disconnect from net works while recording, make sure all anti mal-ware is completely disabled, turn off firewalls, etc. Etc.

On some systems some of these won't cause issues (there are currently a lot of times I will record on networked systems but this can lead to problems for everybody) but each has proven to troublesome to somebody.

The less clutter, the less bloat you have the fewer problems, as a general rule, you'll experience with audio production. One of the main reasons for recommending dedicated audio machines. A major problem for audio production has always been negative interaction with video cards. A number of audio apps have issues with Vista's 3D graphics, for example (again not a prime suspect for your symptoms and that some systems with some audio apps do not have an issue with 3d graphics says nothing about them being problematic for a host of other systems)

From your brief description of symptoms I would first look to anything that was interfering with communication with a dedicated audio drive. Next on the list would be anything that robbed CPU cycles from the audio app.