Urgent help needed with HUGE memory leak in Windows explorer

[danbcox]

Ok, so I have a fairly new Windows10 build with lots of Ram and relatively few programs installed. However I seem to be getting a huge memory leak whenever windows explorer is running. Task manager will show the Ram usage quite easily go from a couple of hundred megabytes to 48GB within a couple of minutes, without any other programs running. CPU, and Network usage remain normal throughout. Restarting explorer.exe from task Manager will temporarily fix the memory leak but as soon as windows explorer is started, the ram starts to escalate again until I start getting 'windows is low on memory' or 'windows needs to close some applications to restore memory' warning messages. I sometimes even get these messages whilst the ram usage is still relatively low compared to the amount available.

I have tried changing the regisrty value suggested here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=184&v=7_yv-sZxub4 in other simmilar threads and although it seemed to work at first, it soon started leaking again.

I also tried a full virus scan, and all of my drivers are up to date.

Can anyone help me fix the cause of this, as I can't work without windows explorer?

 

[danbcox]

Ok, I think I've found the answer. I uninstalled a thumbnail viewer shell extension called MysticThumbs which gives thumbnails for image files that aren't normally icon-supported by windows by default (files such as psd, Ai, tga, tiff, iff) ..and now everything seems to be working fine. The additional thumbnails was really useful to my work, so I looked for an alternative and installed one called sageThumbs ..no problems with this one so far Will re-post if the problem re-appears, but for now hopefully this will help any others experiencing the same problem.

 

[johnbl]

yes, it was an app that caused the memory usage. (explorer extension)
if it was a device driver then the paged pool or non paged pool values would be very large.
paged pool is virtual memory used by device drivers in c:\pagefile.sys
non paged pool is RAM memory used by device drivers that is not swapped to the pagefile.sys

Ok, I think I've found the answer. I uninstalled a thumbnail viewer shell extension called MysticThumbs which gives thumbnails for image files that aren't normally icon-supported by windows by default (files such as psd, Ai, tga, tiff, iff) ..and now everything seems to be working fine. The additional thumbnails was really useful to my work, so I looked for an alternative and installed one called sageThumbs ..no problems with this one so far Will re-post if the problem re-appears, but for now hopefully this will help any others experiencing the same problem.