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This question has been asked several times all across the internet, but without any satisfactory answer to date so I'll try again.

For almost two years now, I've been noticing ridiculous memory usage by explorer.exe . I have gone through disabling shell extensions, malware checks, and the issue persists.

Basically explorer.exe just consumes RAM like the memes say about Chrome.

In Process Explorer I can see that several little programs and applications, like Chrome, are nested below explorer.exe, however killing those does not affect the working set of explorer. Scrolling through the loaded libraries of explorer in Process Explorer, I can't find anything that seems out of the ordinary, like extreme RAM consumption or massive amounts of instances. The biggest things here seem to be the Nvidia drivers, totally on a private WS of ~800kB.

Process Explorer:

Screenshot of Process Explorer
(Click image to enlarge)

karel
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traxx2012
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    Amount of memory it uses? Max memory consumption you've seen? There are two different versions of `explorer.exe` that run, one is the Windows Shell and the other is Explorer _(the Shell always runs and opening Explorer will open a second `explorer.exe` instance)_ and if running [Steps 1 - 6](https://superuser.com/a/1579031/529800) don't fix it, it's third-party application related. – JW0914 Mar 21 '21 at 16:12
  • @JW0914 Memory usually increses from ~40MB at boot to around 800-1000MB, sometimes rising to max capacity (16GB in this system). Thank you for the troubleshoot, I'll go through it. If it then proves to be third-party, I'll just reinstall the whole thing (I really wanted to avoid this) and reinstall only what's really neccessary. – traxx2012 Mar 21 '21 at 16:20
  • @JW0914 or would you kindly assist me in finding out which third-party program exactly causes these issues? – traxx2012 Mar 21 '21 at 16:26

1 Answers1

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After completing SFC, I concluded that my problem did stem from a third party program. Using the Windows Performance Tools, I managed to trace it back to calls to the Message Dll, which weren't unloaded properly.

I did, however, not manage to find out, which program actually makes these calls.

After reinstalling Windows, I followed my gut feeling and reinstalled every single thing I had before, except the Steel Series Engine. The problem does not occur anymore.

traxx2012
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  • For future reference, a Repair Install can be done in lieu of a reinstall of Windows. Run the Windows install's `setup.exe` while booted to Windows and select to keep all files – JW0914 Mar 22 '21 at 11:57