svchost

why is there about 5 or 6 of them on task manager on my pc.

Because of what it, it is the Service Host for other services that don’t run independantly (commonly dlls) so Service Host = SvcHost.exe.

I have 5 of them running and there is nothing wrong with that on my system.

See http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=44612.msg373682#msg373682