Can you say Deja vu? Check out the date on this post...
That one looks legitimate. There are plenty of viruses that try and infect SVCHOST, due to it being a required OS file. It's responsible for running many services on a Windows machine, both Microsoft and 3rd party ones.
If, instead, you enable on-access scan, then you experience some general minor responsiveness, but such difference is less and less perceivable as you move to faster processors. It also seems to me, but I have not tested it extensively, that multi-core processors make the difference unperceivable most times.
It all depends on what is being done on the system. Processors have generally been fast enough for a while to mask the CPU performance impact of on access scanning. Hard drives however haven't kept up speed wise, and multi core processors can just make the situation worse with many more processes trying to perform IO running in parallel. Generally, on access scanning of a machine that is compiling code will add a very noticeable amount of overhead to the task, especially if the link step consumes most of the memory on the machine leaving none for the windows cache.
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