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Windows explorer process memory leak when browsing on my LAN

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by rprastein

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I am experiencing what appears to be a very pecular memory leak problem on my laptop running Windows XP Professional.

My laptop has been leaking huge quantities of memory in the explorer process for the past week or two. After a day or two, I am out of memory (unable to open notepad or any other application, with an error message indicating there is not sufficient memory to do so) and have had to reboot, with the explorer process showing > 1GB of memory utilization in Task Manager. One time I tried just closing the explorer process itself from Task Manager, but it resulted in the machine hanging and I had to power down.

Today, I spent some time trying to determine the conditions under which this occurs. When I boot up with no Explorer windows open, or open an Explorer window and browse around my local hard drive, the explorer process uses between 25 and 35MB of memory, depending on what I'm doing. If I browse to my workstation, \\rhp, same thing -- until I browse to a particular directory on \\rhp. Then explorer starts leaking memory, about 300K every 10 seconds. I can just watch the memory utilization roll up and up before my very eyes in Task Manager.

Once the leaking starts, it continues for as long as that Explorer window is open - regardless of where I browse. Once I close the window, memory stops leaking, and in fact goes down a bit (not quite as low as it was before it started leaking). The interesting thing is, that the \\rhp workstation itself, which is also running XP Professional, is not leaking any memory, even if I have an Explorer window open to the directory where the leaking began when accessed from my laptop.

I've been googling for information on Explorer memory leaks, and am not finding anything helpful.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Rebeccah

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by rgn

I have found the same problem browsing to a folder on our peer-to-peer LAN. The problem occurs for 'servers' running either W98 or XP SP2, and for both 'clients' as well. In our situation it stems from an Autodesk installer file for a free viewer for CAD (DWG format) drawings, DWGTrueView. This is a WinZip self-extractor. The version I downloaded in January and another 2008 version I got today both have the problem. Oddly I had done several previous installations from the earlier version without difficulty.

The workaround today was to change the file extension to .txt from the console of the server. The folder could then be browsed across the LAN to copy the file and then change it back to .exe to run.

October '08 update: just found the same problem with the XP SP3 downloaded executable. I had this with a few other .exes in a shared folder. Browsing to this folder from another PC caused Explorer on the browsing PC to run VERY slowly. It's the memory leak again. I found out which file it was by putting all the .exes in their own separate sub-folders in the shared folder. Then, with Task Manager already open on the (rebooted) browsing PC, clicking on each sub-folder in turn whilst watching the memory used by explorer.exe identifies the culprit.

Once again, changing the file extension for storage to .txt, or adding .blocked at the end, is sufficient to avoid the problem.

To use the file, copy it to the browsing PC and then rename it on arrival. No memory leak then occurs.

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