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