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.
Simply because it is a system file does not mean that it does not depend upon others for its operation, or that MS will not change it and/or others somehow in a future configuration.
I had a similar problem some years ago when a few particular pieces of software would no longer run when there was no problem previously. Turned out that MS had updated a particular dll file for "greater efficiency", however the update broke other (non-MS) programs that needed a particular function in that file to operate. Not surprised that something similar appears to have occurred again.