Explorer.exe leaking memory on Vista?

Goragoth

Regular
I am beginning to suspect that Vista Explorer has some sort of memory leak and I'm wondering if I'm alone on this. I've noticed this ever since upgrading to Vista a couple of weeks ago. For example, currently my uptime is around 5-6 days and Explorer is using about 800MB of memory, which seems a little excessive to say the least.

So what I would really like to know is if this is specific to my system, or if other people are seeing something similar happening. If this is a major bug affecting many systems then at least there is some hope that Microsoft will fix it in the future, otherwise I'll have to try to figure out what is causing this behaviour on my system. Restarting Explorer once a week just doesn't really appeal to me.
 
Up time is three weeks on this computer, process using the largest amount of memory is firefox.exe at 65MB. I haven't noticed the issue you've mentioned and about the last 10 computers with Vista I've seen in the last week have not shown it either.

Have you considered it might be a program you're running that modifies it in any way? Possible I guess.
 
Thanks for the reply, that prompted me to have a closer look at Explorer. One interesting thing that I found was that it had a ton of threads running in nevideo.ax and mpg2splt.ax. nevideo.ax is Nero video (codec?) file. Presumably this is related to thumbnail generation of videos. Perhaps I need to try to unregister nevideo.ax and see if that makes a difference.
 
I upgraded explorer on my comp (xp) whereafter the leaking is horrible. I always have several tabs open and mostly use firefox, but some sites only work with explorer :cry:

A few hours with explorer & a few tabs open and it brings a X2 4400 with 2gb ram to the ground every time, if I leave it on over the night it takes forever just to get explorer to respond and wake up so I can kill it it. No virus/spyware, only explorer. No problem with opera or firefox.

Most likely a new horrible build with huge memory leakge. BTW, just come to think of it, do XP & Vista use the explorer build or is there some fundamental difference?
 
I visited my father on Saturday & my half sisters Shuttle (XP) had IE7 using 1.7gb of pagefile with only two tabs open :oops:
After a reboot it was back to normal so rather looks like a leak to me.
I don't use IE for anything other than windows update & the occasional site that doesn't work on Firefox so its never open long enough to display that sort of thing.
Firefox currently sitting on 40 tabs & 230mb RAM usage.

The good side is that this shuttle was an unstable biatch for me but must be working ok to stay up long enough for a memory leak that big to develop.
 
Just to clarify, I'm talking about Windows Explorer, the shell, and not Internet Explorer, the web browser. I wouldn't touch IE with a ten foot pole.

Anyway, I've unregistered nevideo.ax and I'm keeping an eye on Explorer's memory usage (after restarting it). So far it's sitting at a far more reasonable 80MB used.
 
shame you arnt running xp you could of used an alternative shell - are there any for vista ?

No alternative shells, at least not yet.

Based on observation of my office laptop with Vista, I'd say there's something amiss on your computer. Explorer on my T60 is using about ~35mb of ram with about 40 hours of power-on time.
 
The IE Tab Firefox extension works very well for most sites that require IE. And if it doesn't, they often try to do sneaky stuff you don't want them to in the first place.
 
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