explorer.exe is using up most my CPU and memory, also some crashing

Aisunix · 30 Sep 2014

So a little background on the problem, it's been going on for about a week now and what happens is I'll boot up my PC and as soon as it finishes booting up explorer.exe will use 50% of my cpu and the memory usage climbs up to about 300K-500K over the course of a minute. After scouring the internet for a little over a week and trying various things, I decided to make this thread, but there's one thing I want to point out that may or may not be important (not sure so that's why im bringing it up).

In most of the threads/posts where people had a similar issue they seem to have some way to reproduce the crashing portion of the problem, whether it be right clicking, or opening a particular folder or something else. For me, the crashing is seemingly random and unreproducible, I had one day where explorer.exe crashed every 10-20 minutes, but other than that it will usually only crash one or two times over the course of the entire day. Also on two occasions when I booted up my computer I had absolutely no issues for hours, but when I turned it off and booted it up later that day it came back. Aside from explorer.exe acting weird my computer is fully usable as far as I can tell.

So now that I got that out of the way, I'll list the things I have tried so far.

-boot in safe mode and clean boot (I miiiight have done this incorrectly, will try again tomorrow if I need to.

-everything in this thread except #4 because I have no disc on me at the moment
Troubleshooting Explorer.exe Crashing Issues

-a ton of various virus scans

I'm going to attach a dump file of one of the crashes I managed to catch, I haven't had a crash since then so I have no other dump files, but the cpu/memory problem still persists. I've wasted a lot of time on this and looking back on it now, backing up everything and reformatting probably would have saved me a ton of time, but after investing so much into it I'd just like to know what's wrong and if I can do anything about it at this point. It's about 3:30 am right now and I'm a bit out of it so if I've left out something or anything like that let me know. Any help is really appreciated, thanks!

MilesAhead · 30 Sep 2014

Did you ever have a power out without a UPS? I'm thinking maybe explorer.exe somehow got corrupted.

For grins I would try
sfc /scannow
from an elevated command prompt.

Aisunix · 01 Oct 2014

As far as I know, there have been no unusual power outs or shut downs for as long as I can remember. I ended up trying sfc /scan 5 more times and it still comes up clean. If explorer.exe is corrupted is there anything I can do? Also I have another crash dump now, it seems it be a little different though.

MilesAhead · 02 Oct 2014

BlueScreenView program won't even load this dmp file.

Edit: Since you get bad action right from boot I'm wondering if it's a hardware issue. If you can I would try a disk diagnostic that runs off a USB boot to take Windows out of the picture. See if HD or memory has some issues.

Callender · 02 Oct 2014

I looked at both your dumps over the last couple of days and don't see any problems with shell extensions that I can pinpoint. I'm not an expert on crash dump analysis but for Explorer crashing issues your dump files are unusually large. To my untrained eye I see that you have some sort of handwriting recognition enabled and the .dll is repeatedly shown in your dump file.

So how about disabling the Tablet PC Input service and disabling handwriting recognition in whatever software is configured to use it? Typically it's an office suite.

Other than that try updating any software that installs a right click context menu anywhere - you see these entries when right clicking on files, folders or drives. There can be different entries for various file types.

explorer.exe is using up most my CPU and memory, also some crashing

explorer.exe is using up most my CPU and memory, also some crashing

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