Its not the latest batch that have done this

we noticed it on all our PCs at work after the monthly update two months ago, and its gotten worse after each successive set of updates. The svchost function has featured in all of this.

Pentium 3s running XP and Office 2003 with all the patches are now so slow, we have had to stop other functions, and IE is crashing whenever we open more than a few tabs at a time on 2.8GHz machines. Its brought our hardware replacement programe plans forward quite considerably, and we haven't even contemplated the effects of upgrading to Vista!