Explorer taking up 100% CPU usage? Temps skyrocket.

edited July 2005 in Hardware
This started happening yesterday. Explorer.exe will suddenly take 100% CPU usage and uses major amounts of memory. Yesterday the mem usage went up to 130,000k. The only thing I've been able to do was end explorer.exe and then start it up again and all is well. Nothing out of the ordianary is running either. I recently turned off some services but I don't think it would have anything to do with this. I'm going to run AVG scan right now. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks-DaK

Comments

  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited April 2004
    sounds like spyware to me. if i remember correctly the exact same thing happened on one of my friends pcs, a good dose of ad-aware and avg ought to do it
  • edited April 2004
    I ran AVG and it didn't come up with anything. I think I found the problem though. As strage as it sounds, everytime I open an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm explorer goes nuts. I also can't edit the name of the file. I'm really not sure what the problem is with the episode. I'll try running adaware and see if it comes up with anything.

    EDIT: Ran Adaware and it found 18 objects, nothing substantial.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited April 2004
    dak125 wrote:
    This started happening yesterday. Explorer.exe will suddenly take 100% CPU usage and uses major amounts of memory. Yesterday the mem usage went up to 130,000k. The only thing I've been able to do was end explorer.exe and then start it up again and all is well. Nothing out of the ordianary is running either. I recently turned off some services but I don't think it would have anything to do with this. I'm going to run AVG scan right now. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks-DaK

    Um, defrag the file system ( run disk defragmenter). Every time my NTFS file system gets fragged enough, Explorer grabs lots of RAM to track it. Explorer .NE. Iexplore. Iexplore = Internet Explorer. Explorer is your FILE Explorer. Give Explorer many file fragments to track, it grabs lots of RAM. Especially if you are in a folder with fragged files. In this case, fragged .NE. fubarred or destroyed, rather fragged = stored in many pieces.

    John D.
  • GobblesGobbles Ventura California
    edited April 2004
    if your spyware clean and defragged and its still happening then try this...

    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;819946

    know MS issue

    Gobbles
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited April 2004
    i think what hes experiencing is a problem with windows indexing avis incorrectly, lemme find a fix real fast
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited April 2004
    see if this fixes it (i had this problem, fixed it for me)

    http://www.tweakxp.com/display.aspx?id=841
  • edited April 2004
    Thanks for the replies, but it's not happening anymore. As long as I don't open that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm then it's been fine. If it comes up again then I'll try the fix. Thanks for the responses.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited April 2004
    well i know, what im telling you is that the reason it was happening is fixed in that link. if you follow the instructions, it will never happen again
  • edited April 2004
    TheBaron wrote:
    well i know, what im telling you is that the reason it was happening is fixed in that link. if you follow the instructions, it will never happen again

    Just did the little tweak, seems to be working fine. Thanks Baron.
  • edited March 2005
    If anyone is still having a problem, try this solution. It worked for me:

    http://www.tweakxp.com/article139607.aspx

    Apparently if you have an incomplete AVI file explorer tries to read the entire file to get it's width / height / etc and it uses up all of explorers resources
  • edited July 2005
    Had the almost exaxtly same problem as dak125, seems bugmenot has the correct answer (although i didnt manage to follow the link).

    Had an incomplete .avi file on my disk, and whenever i tried to open the folder it was in, explorer went 99% CPU usage after a short while. I then noticed it happened when the width-height of the file was supposed to appear.

    The only way to delete it was from the command prompt, but then everything went back to normal.

    I might be a bit late in posting on this thread, but when searching for a solution I found so many different answers to this problem that i think this post may help people who has this same bug to find it.
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