explorer.exe page fault leak

[VtheLion]

Hello Everybody -

I've spent the last few weeks tracking down a frustrating
problem with windows slowing down to the point of
needing a reboot. After the reboot, it runs awesome.
I actually reformatted and reinstalled XP. After a few
days I started to notice that my problem did NOT go
away. This is what I discovered.

If you run windows Task Manager and select the processes tab.
Then under View: choose select columns.
Choose: Memory Usage, Memory Usage Delta, Page Faults,
Page Faults Delta, User Objects, GDI Objects.

Actually all you need are the 2 page faults, but the others
are helpful. Well, if you look at the page faults for explorer.exe
you will notice that they are constantly increasing, forever.
The more you open explorer windows, the faster it happens.

So I took my second computer that I use to test new software,
and reformatted and reinstalled XP there. As soon as it
finished installing, before doing ANYTHING else, I did the
above task manager test and to my great amazement it was
still doing the same thing.

So I called 4 other people that I know with XP and over the
phone did the Task Manager thing with them and guess what?
They ALL did the same thing. Every last one of them.

Now here's the kicker (I suppose). I had noticed a few of my
other apps while they were running also were loosing to
page faults. So I gently but firmly did the End Process
on explorer.exe. Everything went normal. All the programs that
were leaking stopped. My system was solid at that point.

Restart explorer and all hell lets loose again. OK I could understand
if it was just my computer, but its not. I have been doing general
Google searches and have come up with absolutely nothing, which
I also find strange.

Anyone got any good news they can give me?

Oh yes, did I say if I boot in SAFE mode, the problem persists!
I did and it does.

Thanks Ya'll
V- theLion

 

[Alex Nichol]

Actually all you need are the 2 page faults, but the others
are helpful. Well, if you look at the page faults for explorer.exe
you will notice that they are constantly increasing, forever.
The more you open explorer windows, the faster it happens.

A page fault happens whenever a program tries to access a memory page
not immediately to hand in the processor's mapping tables. Then if it
has never been used or is in page file it is an 'invalid page fault' and
needs paging in. They are perfectly normal, and you will see the total
for explorer increasing. Two instances here show a total of nearly 100
K between them and it was only booted, as it happens, three hours ago.
It is not usually a useful metric