explorer.exe takes nearly 100% of memory

[homayoon]

on of my friends have this problem for quite sometime now and its damn annoying

"EXPLORER.EXE" hogs all my memory - (in running a XP sp2 on a p4 w 612 mb RAM ) - and once in half-hour or so, explorer.exe takes nearly 100% of memory it drags down the comps performance and everything gets REAL sluggish

only thing i can do is kill the process explorer.exe with the taskman and its not even a clean kill... it takes about 'nother five mins for things to get back to normal after i 'end process'
is there really a "fix" for this problem?

[Naif]

Hi homayoon. I suggest you ask your friend to install an antivirus and a spyware/adware scanner on his system and do a full system scan. This problem should not be related to his hardware because having a P4 processor and 512MB+ ram is sufficient enough to extract decent performance from Windows XP. So most propably this has to be an spyware/adware, virus or a worm infection. Apart from this, ask him to download a registry cleaner too. Most of the time, the reason for a system lag is an infection or a clogged up registry with many invalid entries.

[Devil_Inc]

i noticed this before with other systems and it may not be the spyware, aparently background programs running also impacts the explorer.exe, your services might have something to do with it, also it could be that the you havent rebooted in a while (unlikely but most of us dont reboot in days).

`p34ce`
Ron

[Transcendum]

"EXPLORER.EXE" hogs all my memory

Generally, explorer.exe doesn't require too much RAM to run, even when it's called by a lot of other processes. The only case (I know of) when it can actually hog all the memory is when the system is infected with a virus, as Naif mentioned.


I only said a "virus" because I've never heard about a spyware/adware/worm that causes explorer.exe to utilize 100% of RAM, but there are many reported viruses that do exactly so.


So yes, your best bet is to install an antivirus. I recommend BitDefender, which does a terrific job.



Cheers.

[Nominal]

Explorer.exe is supposed to be an essential program to run Windows.
I think it must be a virus like everyone else said since there is no reason why explorer.exe will hog 100% of the memory.

To get a good antivirus program, you could try AVG Free, which as the name implies, is free. www.free.grisoft.com

You could also get Ad and Anti Spyware programs like Ad-aware SE Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy from Cnet.com

[khfinalmix]

It doesnt hog all 100% for me. Iti s really low for me. Sorry about it taking all your memory. Are you sure you arent running anything else when using IE?

[Niaoson]

Mine took up lots of memory when I was using Windows Media Player and I plugged in my thumbdrive. I was running Windows Media Player 11.

Well, it went back to normal after I removed the thumbdrive. Never had it take up nearly 100% though. Good luck :cloud9:

[m107]

Could it be your Firewall/AV?
Have you blocked explorer.exe in your firewall?
Any other tasks hogging at the same time this happens?

Alternatively windows update or DNS server can hog resources, fix turn them off.
and can you please tell about your win license?
i mean did you buy it or any thing else

Just a few thoughts.....

[homayoon]

Thanx all, i kinda managed to solve the problem Smile

more googling and help from 'nother forum led me to a "fix" - the problem seems apparently due to the fact that windows tries to process broken/incomplete .AVI files (of which i have a lot- from my torrents) - before showing in the explorer.

"caused by bad behavior of shmedia.dll."

there were a bunch of "fix"es suggested... i tried doing the simplest looking fix - delete the registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{87D62D9 4-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}\InProcServer32

Things look much better now, looks like the problem is fixed

[abartar]

You could have also tried to use the XP option of configuring memory for best performance inplace of best view.. sometimes it solves the problem... as windows Xp configures itself to use the backend process to improve the performance.... Anyway your problem is resolved....