explorer.exe process slowing down Windows XP Pro SP1

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kadir
  • Start date Start date
K

Kadir

From time to time explorer process slows down my system running XP
PRO. It appears as if explorer is doing some background system
maintenance task taking up 60 % of the CPU time, the remaining 40% is
shared by system.exe and system idle process. During this time, there
is very slight disk activity, IDE light barely flickers. Explorer uses
approx 120 MB of memory and this amount increases with fluctuations
ending up as high as 600 MB when I have to kill the process.

The only workaround to get the system to normal is to kill the
exploerer process in task manager and restart another instance of
explorer process upon which the sytem immediately returns to normal
and explorer CPU occupation drops to 0.

BTW, the explorer application is not necessarily active during the
problem. It is the process that is busying out the system.

System Config:

2.6 GHZ Pentium 4 (hyperthreading)
512 MB Memory
Intel 865 Chipset (ASUS MB)


Things I have checked and done:

Indexing service is in manual mode and not started.

My Virus Checker (Mc Afee 4.5.1) is up-to-date

I have let the system try to finish whatever it had to do, but after
an hour or so, the amount of memory used up by explorer exceeded my
physical memory and the system started thrashing. At this point I had
to kill the process because I believe there is no way it can finish
any task in this mode.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks


Kadir
 
I have the same problem. I am running Windows XP Home Edition SP1
I have even tried to manually increasing my virtual memory but this did not work. At times a low virtual memory error occurs, the error states that windows will increase virtual memory but does not. The longer my computer is on the slower it get. I am going to try to leave my computer on to see how long this lasts.
 
I have discovered that will monitoring processes with task manager I found once stopping fax service explorer stopped using so much cpu power and memory
If you are running fax service, try stopping it. I went as far as to run MSCONFIG and unchecked the fax box in services then rebooted.
 
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