I'm running Vista Home Premium, 64 bit with 4gb memory. I realize that "explorer.exe" may consume additional memory over a period of time but in my case it seems to be out of control. Typically the process will start at about 25mb of memory however the usage will continue to increase to ridiculous levels even when my machine is idle. I recently left my PC running while I was out of town for 3 days and discovered explorer.exe was consuming nearly 500mb of physical memory by the time I returned. This excess is never restored to my system unless I either reboot or manually kill the explorer.exe process and restart it.
I've tried temporarily disabling likely suspects such as Norton NIS 2009, Diskeeper, various Vista system indexing features, other unnecessary processes, services, etc., but still have not stumbled upon the culprit. I have also scanned exhaustively for malware and virus problems but the system seems to be squeaky clean. Lastly I have made sure my page file is of adequate size.
If anyone could offer any suggestions as to how I can pinpoint whatever process is causing explorer.exe to utilize so much memory I'd really appreciate it :-)
I've tried temporarily disabling likely suspects such as Norton NIS 2009, Diskeeper, various Vista system indexing features, other unnecessary processes, services, etc., but still have not stumbled upon the culprit. I have also scanned exhaustively for malware and virus problems but the system seems to be squeaky clean. Lastly I have made sure my page file is of adequate size.
If anyone could offer any suggestions as to how I can pinpoint whatever process is causing explorer.exe to utilize so much memory I'd really appreciate it :-)