process trees in sysinternals process explorer

[idoru]

It's not in task manager but sysinternals process explorer.

Usually and if my memory serves me well, there's :
- system idle process
- then system and it's child processes
- then explorer and it's child processes

Lately I had some explorer crashes resulting in a new and (un) tree like explorer in process explorer. So I did a sfc /scannow that seems to do it's job as the crashes vanished but peeking yesterday in process explorer I noticed that things got screwed a bit...

I still have SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS in the first place, then SYSTEM with some of it's child process BUT with some (previous) explorer processes, then (usually) explorer processes, some with their respective childs as chrome and it's opened tabs, THEN explorer with 4, 5 entries.

Any ideas ?

 

[Alejandro85]

Can you show a picture of the problem? Preferably the whole process tree including the troublesome processes.

 

[idoru]

as you can see, there is no usual application hierarchy/tree : all applications launched by explorer should be on it's tree, like roboform, ditto, flux, SRS sandbox, etc... (as should be those launched by system upon startup)

I've tried sorting them by putting 'system idle process ' as it was, the parent of all it didn't work

 

[Alejandro85]

Ok, now it's clear what's happening. Since Explorer crashed, all its child processes went "orphan" (as their parent isn't running any longer), and therefore shown at the root of the process tree.

You can confirm this by opening the properties of some processes and looking at its parent. For the new processes it'll be the currently running instance, but for the previous ones it'll be flagged as "non existant process" which will make it impossible to put in the tree.

What you're seeing is totally normal and expectable, as a consequence of Explorer crashing.
What's not normal nor epectable nor desirable is having Explorer crashing. That's your real problem and the thing you need to investigate.