svchost crash/ low C drive space

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Hi

Using Win XP SP2 with all updates.

A few weeks ago I started getting some svchost related problems.
Sometimes I get an "attempt to read address ......" error message
reported. Sometimes I get a system "lockup" where my hard drive
becomes continuously busy and the system runs very slowly. After a
while, low C drive space is reported. Task manager won't run and
attempting to restart takes a long time (several minutes) for the
restart to happen (if it happens at all), - upon restart/reboot the
"lockup" resumes with the hard drive continuously busy and C drive
space falling. Somehow the process eventually stops if I let it run
but I'm left with several hundred MB of less C drive space than I had
before.

With the latest occurrence of this, after the system became usable
again, I found two svchost crash dump files (of zero size) in
windows/pchealth/errorrep/userdumps, plus a dumprep***something.pf
file in windows\prefetch directory with date/times of around the crash
time.

I have Trend Micro security sw with all protection enabled and I very
much doubt if this is a virus.

Any ideas what I can do about this or where my C drive space is going?
The virtual mem file pagefile.sys is currently around 800 MB and it's
"last modified" date/time is around the time of the latest crash.
Does this file go up and down in size by large amounts?

Thanks for any ideas.

akiwi
.