Norton 360 CcSvcHst.exe bug. On Windows XP with Service Pack 3 and all Microsoft Critical Updates as of August 13, 2013 10:53:36.
Norton 360 Version: 20.4.0.40 -- But this has always been a problem bug since at least 2010 with all versions of Norton 360 since at least 2010 that I have seen running on computers with limited CPU resources = 2 GHz, 1 Gb of RAM. The CcSvcHst.exe takes off for no good rational reason and hogs the machine.
Just now, I had to rediscover an efficient fix again for my two laptops with limited resources, because my prior workarounds no longer are effective, given the repeated updates from Norton, so I am posting this workaround here for my own reference and for anyone else that does not find useful the repeated suggestion outside this Symantec site--which general fix starts with 1) Uninstall Norton 360 and install a Norton competitor . . . .
What I did this morning August 13, 2013 11:03:37 as the beginning of a SufficientFix was shut off all scheduled Norton activities, including automated Update and automated Scan. However, there is still some automatic scheduler function that restarts the Root CcSvcHst.exe session once in a while for no good reason, the same ProcessIdentifier that starts when Norton 360 starts; the runaway CcSveHst.exe session never completes, grabbing 99% CPU and 120,000 KB of "Mem Usage" according to the Windows Task Manager.
This morning I said to myself, "What would I do if this were one of my custom software writings that I did not have time to debug right now? By what workaround would I get the software to reset the internal registers that have gone awry without restarting the whole software package or the whole computer system?"
The answer I tried that worked was 1) triggering some process related to the automated scheduler and then 2) killing that process manually--to see if killing the process would reset whatever registers inside had gone awry.
Here is what worked. I started a manual session of "Run LiveUpdate", and as soon as that Run LiveUpdate started -- in a new CcSvcHst.exe session -- I Canceled it from the UserControl screen. When the Run LiveUpdate cancellation completed, the runaway CcSvcHst.exe session dropped to zero CPU usage and the Mem Usage dropped to under 11,000 K. I have to do this about every four hours or so--which is tolerable for me whenever I use the computational models that I run on my two laptops that have very limited CPU resources.