[Paul Riley]

It is in fact part of the windows operating system and there should be about 4 instances of this running in the background.Disabling this could cause system instability so I would recommend leaving them alone.The fact that you say they are seriously draining CPU usage means it COULD be malware or a virus because the normal windows versions of this file dont sap that much CPU time,and take up about about 2-3MB worth of system memory.
I would get hold of 2 freeware programs I use for removing malware,they are:

Adaware
Spybot search and destroy

Perform a full system scan with these and remove all entries that are discovered.
If all else fails it may be worth your while doing a full hard drive format to remove anything burrowed into your OS.This is like nuking your hard drive but its the only way to remove unwanted things that wont go any other way.Backup all important data before formatting.
Also,adding more memory to your system could alleviate some of the memory problems you may be experiencing with this service running.

Its a fact that most of the services running are a pain in the arse and some of them are not even needed.This is bloatware at its best,courtesy of Microsoft.

Hope some of this helps.