I was already at the security section...at length. My machine is clean but I was pointed to the "tech section" for my ongoing issue. Upon reboot, my machine has an instance of svchost.exe running at 50% (or very, very close) constantly.
The security rep mentioned that I have a lot of things loading on start-up. A couple of times I've run cleaners, rebooted and the issue is gone, but after a 2nd reboot, it's back.
Another time Microsoft had me run through each item in msconfig and disable them one at a time and rebooting every time. I found that one time after disabling Mcafee system guard the issue went away, but then came back.
McAfee had me uninstall some of my favorite programs like Adaware, superantispyware, spybot, and spyblaster. That didn't work and I came here...and we got rid of some baaaad stuff. I've reinstalled superantispyware and adaware.