explorer.exe memory leak

[her34]

hi i need help trying to solve this problem. i rarely reboot my system and recently i've noticed that explorer.exe has a memory leak. after about a few days of usage it'll climb to ~60-80mb VM size in task manager. i reboot and it starts off at ~20mb again.

i've run norton anti-virus, spybot search and destroy, and ad aware on my system but it's still happening. i've updated windows and other programs with latest updates.

there isn't a particular program that causing the leak, it just slowly increases over time. i'm running office apps, and internet explorer most of the time.


any ideas on what a typical cause of this problem might be? or any ideas on how to figure out what's causing it?

 

[Tegeril]

This is absolutely 100% normal.

 

[VirtualLarry]

On both of my boxes, Explorer.exe's max VM size is around 12MB. Something does sound wrong there.

 

[Tegeril]

I disagree. Your two computers would be the first two I've -ever- seen -ever- that do not increase memory use over the course of multiple days.

 

[ktwebb]

Yeah, 60-80MB for explorer after any amount of uptime isn't a memory leak. Watching it climb and continue, say in upwards of 100, 200, 300 etc, then you have a problem. Going to 80 and maintaining after a day or two is normal.

 

[gerwen]

Originally posted by: Tegeril
I disagree. Your two computers would be the first two I've -ever- seen -ever- that do not increase memory use over the course of multiple days.

Make that 3.

My system here at work has been up for 21 days, constantly running multiple tasks, installing, testing, and removing software. Currently i'm running 2 terminals to a location half the continent away, Firefox, Cmd, Outlook, a Virtual Linux console, 6 explorer windows, and excel My Explorer.exe size in memory is 12,764K.

 

[Robor]

I've got 91 hours of uptime and explorer.exe shows 25MB of RAM usage. I've got Outlook 2003, Remote Desktop (x2), DameWare, and Firefox 2 (x2) open over that period with Symantec Corporate 10 running as well.

 

[her34]

so some people are able to run for days without memory increasing?

any ideas on what may be causing the leak? any program that will analyze and tell me?

 

[kadooosh]

u may wanna try to remove the media preview thingy and if its rly needed remove the image preview...
it certainly reduces memory usage ^^

* To remove media preview: ?regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll? (without the quotes) and then hit enter.
* To remove image preview: ?regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll? (without the quotes) and then hit enter.

What you are actually doing is that you are telling the computer to unregister (unload) the shmedia.dll library and the shimgvw.dll library which take care of image and media previews.


If you want to enable it again just type the commands above without the ?/u? like this:

* For media preview: ?regsvr32 shmedia.dll? (without the quotes) and then hit enter.
* For image preview: ?regsvr32 shimgvw.dll? (without the quotes) and then hit enter.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Explorer.exe should NOT be growing in memmory usage like that when the system is idle. If you have no explorer windows open, etc, then there is no excuse at all for it to use that kind of resources.

I don't know the resource usage off the top of my head at home, however, the PC I'm using at work is Pentium 4 running Win2K. I last rebooted this box in November. It gets heavy multitasking use every Monday through Friday.

The Mem Usage of Explorer.exe here is 5,276K, with a peak mem usage of 41,204K, and a VM Size of 12,192K.
I'd expect XP to be a bit higher, but not quite that extreme.


Something is wrong with your system.

EDIT: as far as a solution, I'm not so sure, you've done most of what I would do.
I would also manually go through the registry, but I'm a glutton for pain.