Windows 2000: Memory leak in Removable Storage service

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Guest

I have Windows 2000 Pro, SP4 with all updates applied (yes, I know this is
the XP forum, but there doesn't seem to be one for 2k). I have recently found
the memory usage steadily increasing all the time the machine is on, rising
to over 2GB after about 10 minutes. I have tracked this down to the Removable
Storage service. Stopping that service releases the memory, and starting it
again causes the memory usage to rise again. I have now disabled the service.

This may have been caused by a recent crash corrupting a file, but I've no
idea where to start looking there.

A few questions:
1. What is this service needed for?
2. Does disabling it do any harm? I use a USB hard disk and flash drives.
3. Is there a way to fix this, apart from disabling the service?
 
I have just found that the file:
C:\WINNT\system32\NtmsData\NTMSIDX
on this machine is 1.77GB. On a previous backup of the entire hard disk
(taken before reinstalling), this file is only 218KB. Is this file anything
to do with the Removable Storage service, and is it possible that the memory
"leak" is caused by the service attempting to load this file into memory? Is
it safe to simply delete this file?
 
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