Whenever my computer starts, i always wait for the red light in the CPU, which indicates the CPU is busy, to go off but it's taking too long. When i look at the task manager under the processes tab, The svchost.exe uses 99 percent of the CPU and it as the highest memory usage of all processes. What is the svchost for? And also, there are about 5 "svchost"s under thre processes tab in the task manager. I am using a pentium 4 PC with 512 mb of ram.

Just means some hosted programs are all loaded and running at the same time (which slows your cpu down a bit).

The trick is to find out WHICH programs are running. Under TM, if you look at applications, is there anything running? If you go to Start, Run and type Msconfig, what shows under Services after you check the box for 'Hide All Microsoft Services' ?

Also while there, are there any Startup programs you aren't sure about?

Lastly, if you can't find anything strange those ways, download and run HijackThis and have a look there.