Every once in a while, you find an article on Microsoft’s knowledge base that actually helps answer questions you’ve had for a long time. While researching why a process was eating up so much of my CPU I found the following article - A Description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP (Q314056).

For years I’ve wondered how to find out what tasks were behind svchost.exe; this article shows you how. At a command prompt simply type tasklist /svc.