Build 7229 x64 Explorer.exe memory issue

pillainp said:

As you can see from my system specs, I am running Windows 7 Build 7229 x64, and am having no major issues so far.

There is one little niggle that I have noticed, though:

With Explorer set to open windows in separate processes, a new process is opened whenever a new explorer window is opened (as expected).

However, as you can see from the attached screenshot, the individual processes for the multiple instances of explorer.exe are not terminated once the instances are closed. The persist as running processes and the only way to reclaim the RAM is to kill them manually.

However, when the "separate processes" option is turned off (ie All explorer windows open within a single process), the original process consumes more and more RAM as each new instance is opened. When all the instances are then closed, explorer still retains the RAM without releasing it, until the process is killed and restarted.

Is this a bug? If so, is there a solution?

This was more or less an accidental finding, since there is no appreciable effect on system performance when this happens.

By launching windows in their own process I assume you are talking about the option in the view tab of folder options "Launch folder windows in a separate process." So if you are talking about something else then most of my response will be irrelevant.

I tested this on
7068 x86
7201 x64
7229 x64

Single Explorer:
On all three of them when the not using separate processes the memory on explorer didn't dump right away, but over time it did return down to a similar memory level. My guess is this has to do with their memory management and it not freeing memory right off the bat. But I did see that it didn't free it up instantly...

Multiple Explorer:
Now each time you open up an explorer window it doesn't open up a new Explorer process, but it will have 1 extra explorer process open that will handle folders specifically... And on all 3 builds I tested it would open when I opened my first window and subsequent windows would just increase the memory of that process. When all windows were closed it would hang around, but after a minute or two it would terminate.

Personal Opinion:
My guess is maybe your explorer is getting confused or locked and is unable to close properly, but it believes it is in a closing or closed state. Hence why you had so many explorer processes. And I'm not sure what could be causing this, my guess would be a virus scan software, or some other intrusive software that integrates itself into explorer. I don't know if you have anything like this, but you might check it out! Good Luck.