If you’ve ever been in a situation where you have a service falling over with no obvious cause, it might be some other service running under the same svchost process causing the failure. As it turns out the Microsoft Performance Team have a very handy guide on svchost troubleshooting.
This covers how to isolate the suspected service into it’s own process, even going as far as running it with it’s own svchost process, so it’s easier to see if it really is the service you suspect causing the problem, or something else. In my case I was trying to pin down a crash with the lanmanserver service, and this was very useful.