Network analysis

Ok, I'm noticing at certain times of the day, my internet connection is busy, causing erratic internet availability to me. This causes my ping to more than double when playing games and sometimes makes them completely unplayable; GuildWars included. Does anybody know a free or inexpensive program that monitors internet activity so I know what process is causing it? My firewall program only says generic win32 host process, and there's usually several of them running. I'd like to know what the actual process is that's causing it. Perhaps something that would report the process that's using my bandwidth and how much bandwidth it's using. Would this generic host proces possibly be a virus? My antivirus doesn't report any viruses on my computer, nor any spyware. Neither does Windows Defender, Spybot S&D, or Adaware. It seems to happen most at peak nighttime hours. And it's not my security suite downloading updates or anything, I have all that stuff set to download in the early morning.

Yes I also have this same sort of problem, so if anyone can suggest anything that would be great.

Myself I use CommView which is a quality network analyzer.

Edit, As for the Generic Host Process for Win32 Services (better know as "svchost.exe"), if you ever used "msconfig" or "services.msc" you'll know there's a whole list of operating system vital services that you need listed there.
There's not even all of them, a lot of them are hidden since a typical user should never mess with them anyway, these can be found in your registry under HKLM\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services.
These are the win32 services, without them, your PC won't even live through half a second of your Windows boot procedure.

These services don't run as stand-alone programs, they're hosted by the svchost.
The more services you require, the more svchosts may appear since they have a limited capacity to maintain system stability.

It's also possible that it's not something in your computer at all. Many cable broadband providers allot bandwidth in blocks to your whole neighborhood, and as a result, when the people around you start using more, at, say, peak activity times (breakfast time, lunch, after work), your ping times go down. Service providers regularly oversell their bandwidth by quite a bit, so this is to be expected.

It sounds like you've done a pretty thorough check for malware; how are you determining that your machine is seeing more traffic than usual? There's http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sys...g/TcpView.mspx <-tcp view, which was part of the sysinternals stuff before microsoft absorbed it all. Ethereal is also good for this kind of work, provided you have some knowledge of networking concepts. The command line tool 'netstat' (comes with windows) might give you a quick and dirty idea of what's going on.

Like I said though, it's possible you're just on at a peak time, and hence, you're seeing the effect of higher than off-peak network saturation in your area.

Well, thing is, I have DSL, so I should not be sharing bandwidth with anyone. I know there's something going on, because I see activity on my router when I have no applications open on my computer. Plus, like when I play Call of Duty, my ping is normally in the 70ish range, but at peak hours my ping jumps up to around 200 on the exact same server I always play.

Well, here's what I've done so far. Windows defender and CA Pest Patrol found nothing on my system. Soooo....I downloaded Spybot S&D and Adaware. Spybot found nearly 200 instances of spyware on my computer, so I let it clean what it found. Then I ran Adaware, and it found an additional 75 instances, which it cleaned. This went a long way to improving my network connection, but I'm still seeing activity on my modem. There is something still moving when there shouldn't be.

I downloaded Wireshark (used to be Ethereal until a lawsuit earlier this year) and captured a short image of the traffic. Since I don't know much about networking, I can only guess at what's happening, but from the packets I captured, I can tell it's something coming from my computer and going to the modem from the originating and destination ip addresses. It is TCP traffic, and ACK and SYN messages, but beyond that, I don't know what I'm looking at. Can anybody give me a clue what I'm looking for or where to find information about packet sniffing? I'd love to know what's initiating the packets and where they are going.

EDIT: Does anybody know what this site is? http://schemas.xmlsoap.org? It appears these packets have that site as a reference