Killing Windows Explorer with task manager ?

[Jack R]

Ok, so has Microsoft change something "by design" here ? I mean, for as long
as I can remember I've been able to open task manager and kill Windows
explorer. I can still do the same but, when I do, every program on my
computer starts shutting down one or two at a time. Has something changed
with a recent update or do I have a problem with my setup ?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

Killing the explorer shell should not cause other software to
shutdown/restart unless it was a part of the shell. Nothing has changed in
this respect. I would suspect some form of malware is involved here. Why are
you having to kill explorer in the first place? This is not something that
should need to be done under normal runtime mode.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Jack R]

Rick Rogers spewed out this bit, and i'll scatter a few bits myself:

Hi,

Killing the explorer shell should not cause other software to
shutdown/restart unless it was a part of the shell. Nothing has
changed in this respect. I would suspect some form of malware is
involved here. Why are you having to kill explorer in the first
place? This is not something that should need to be done under normal
runtime mode.

No malware involved. I was only killing in an attempt to recover, or clam
down the memory usage. Just a curiosity really, nothing else. I thought
maybe if I killed it and started it back the memory usage might be lower.
Like I said, was only messing around and then I noticed all my programs
would die out one at a time.

 

[Steve Thackery]

It usually starts out around 12,000k. Right now it's at 41,544k.

I've seen it as high as 70,000k.

That isn't necessarily a problem, though. Vista is happy to keep your
memory in use until something else asks for it. Paging stuff out to make
your RAM useage appear lower simply wastes time.

Of course, a memory leak is a different matter, but I'd be surprised indeed
if Explorer has such a problem - it would affect lots of people and almost
certainly have been picked up and fixed by now.

SteveT

 

[B. Smith]

I don't think very many people are geeky enough to monitor running
processes in Task Manager looking for memory leaks.

Non-geeks use http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

 

[Ian D]

On my system, the longer the system has been up, the more memory
explorer takes hold of. Logging off and then back on releases some of
it. It usually starts out around 12,000k. Right now it's at 41,544k.
I've seen it as high as 70,000k.

The same behaviour occurs in XP Windows Explorer. It seems
to be cacheing the directories viewed. To test this, view a
large directory such as system32. Explorer may grow by a few
MB. Go to another previously unviewed directory and it
will grow again, but if you go back to system32, it will stay
the same size, or shrink slightly.