Classic Shell: Forum

The other day I had reason to bring up Task Manager and was startled to see my two always-open Explorer windows and shell consuming over 18GB of memory (Windows 8.1 x64, fully updated and patched, 64GB RAM, CS 4.1.0). It seems to have zero impact on my system, but after bouncing them they started out at around 256MB. Over the past few days, it's up to 6GB and rising (it increases by 1MB or so every few seconds).

Is there any chance Classic Shell is involved here, or is there something else going on (or is this normal Windows behavior)?

That's too much memory usage. You may have a shell extension or something that is causing a memory leak. If you suspect Classic Shell is the cause, try to temporarily uninstall it and see if Explorer.exe memory usage climbs up this drastically. On my system, it's close to 3.5 GB and I have tons of shell extensions installed besides Classic Shell.

You could also use NirSoft's ShellExView to rule out shell extensions on your system one by one: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html Disable them one at a time, restart Explorer.exe and start it again using Task Manager and see if Explorer.exe usage rises so fast.

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I am a Windows enthusiast and helped a little with Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

Yes, I recommend you uninstall Classic Shell for a day and see if you get a similar memory usage.

Thanks for the responses. I think I've got it sorted out. I misspoke about the initial memory charge for the two Explorer windows. It starts out around 35MB, and a few traversals and other activity gets it to about 75MB where it stabilizes.

That is, unless one of those Explorer windows is opened to a UNC (as is my usual configuration). Then the inexorable assault on memory begins, at a rate between about 8-160KB per second. The UNC points to an administrative share on a domain member server, but I suspect all that's required is a UNC, any UNC.

That appears to be the catalyst. However, the culprit is not Classic Shell. It's Actual Window Manager. As soon as I stopped it, the memory consumption ceased immediately. I'll give them a heads-up.