The other day I was checking on someting and looking through my prefetch folder and noticed a .pf file for an .exe I hadn't heard of before. It's called conhost.exe. I did a search for it on my harddrive and saw that it's Console Host. I searched online and it seems it takes care of certain functions csrss.exe used to handle, hosts console windows and allows them to be skinnned with the current Windows theme. That's all good an well, but the last modification date/time of the .pf file at the time I checked it would indicate that I was playing a game at the time it had last run. So, I'm pretty sure there was no console window running. I then did a search online to see if anyone else had this issue. It seems it can be somehow related to itunes and also AVG.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0
http://forums.avg.com/us-en/avg-foru...show&id=111357

I don't use itunes, but I do have AVG, though conhost.exe doesn't seem to be an actively running process on my computer like the OP in the AVG thread I linked to. Though, I have noticed that after updating AVG, the conhost.exe .pf was modified at the same time. So it seems to run when AVG is updated. I also found a post somewhere that mentioned it can be related to Zone Alarm Extreme Security. I do run zone Alarm, but not the extreme security version.

So, anyway, my question is why does conhost.exe run when there is seemingly no console window open at the time? I suppose this isn't anything to really worry about, I just like to know my way around an operating system. I'm still fairly new to Windows 7.

Windows 7 SP1 64bit