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First of all I'm by no means an expert but I'll try to explain my problem.

Basically, explorer.exe slowly increases its memory usage, at a rate of roughly 1Mb every 4-5 seconds, as long as the File Explorer is open. When I close the File Explorer, memory remains stable but it does not go back to normal levels. Rebooting explorer.exe resets the memory to normal but it starts to grow as soon as I open it again. It eventually consumes all my RAM, and then Windows starts swapping with pagefile.sys and slowing down the whole system due to the high disk usage.

sfc /scannow has not returned any error.

Following the advices of a recent question (What could possibly cause explorer to "leak" memory?), I used Process Hacker to check what is causing the used memory to increase. Basically, in Process Hacker -> explorer.exe -> Properties -> Memory I see that the memory table has about 2300 entries when I reboot explorer.exe. If I then open the File Explorer and check the number of entries, it goes up constantly, but only when the File Explorer in open.

This goes beyond my knowledge, and hence I don't know how to proceed from here. Any help?

EDIT: I'm on Windows 10, 19042.867.

Carles Borredá
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    Might be caused by an extension of Explorer. See [How to list Explorer extensions and disable them?](https://superuser.com/questions/286000/how-to-list-explorer-extensions-and-disable-them) You could also check if this happens when booting Windows in Safe mode. – harrymc Apr 20 '21 at 13:48
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    What version of Windows are you running? – Ramhound Apr 20 '21 at 13:57
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    You can also use process explorer to see what DLLs the explorer has loaded to see what shell extensions are installed (all shell extensions are done through COM dlls). You can see the memory footprint of the DLLs themselves from there which is usually a good indication of who was sloppy and eating your RAM. – Señor CMasMas Apr 20 '21 at 14:04
  • It's windows 10, and the Shell Extensions appear alright (Notepad++ and Avast related) based on the AutoRuns. – Carles Borredá Apr 20 '21 at 14:33

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