If I had to guess, I would think that as the XP EOL approaches, more and more sites are removing their windoze 'update' sections and the MS people did not think to allow for an option in the software that could recognize a No-Such-Directory return. Thus, the endless waiting to retrieve a file, or even worse an incomplete retrieval when the directory listing pointed to a file that was already being overwritten by newer data.
I searched for a long time on the internet to find the answer but never did find anything that actually fixed it, amazingly enough. The most convincing explanation was that it was a memory leak, but again, I have to wonder how it was that it came up just recently? I think the file date on svchost.exe was from like 2008. I’m seriously puzzled how this could have gotten messed up if the executable hadn’t been changed for essentially 5 years.