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For the last few days, I've had a very weird problem where Explorer.exe starts eating all of my system memory (16GB) after opening an Explorer window. If I restart the process and don't open any explorer window, it doesn't consume more than the regular 50-70 MB, but the moment I do, it jumps to 200-500MB and keeps steadily climbing. After hours of research, I came across this question What could possibly cause explorer to "leak" memory? which solved my problem with the "Update 3" part. However, i kept digging and found out it's ONLY the "Show thumbnails instead of icons" option that starts the leakage when checked. Explorer memory usage and Explorer memory leak (can't post images yet since i just created this account).

My question: is there any way to prevent Explorer to try to load on RAM all of my files' thumbnails? Because that's the only thing I can think of that's happening. I really need to have that option checked to see the thumbnails and not have to open each file individually to see what it is. Or if there's another explorer software I can use instead of the default.

Also, I have a dump of the process with the thumbnails option checked, but I don't know if I should just upload it to some random site and paste the link here or if there's an option to attach it to the question.

Fernando Hernandez
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As referenced by @HelpingHand, the file messing up with explorer was one from CopyTrans, a software I had installed a while back and forgot about. Instead of renaming the specific dll, I just uninstalled the program since I no longer use it. Uninstalling this program fixed the issue completely and I no longer have memory leak through explorer.exe.

Fernando Hernandez
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When considering why a Windows process is exhibiting a memory leak, the first consideration before getting too technical should be what third-party modules are loaded into the process.

In this case, from the dump file of Explorer.exe, the following modules were identified as being third party, primarily based on not being able to load symbols for them from the public Microsoft Symbols server:

  • C:\Program Files\CopyTrans HEIC for Windows\CopyTransHEICforWindows.dll
  • C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\CoreSyncExtension\CoreSync_x64.dll
  • C:\Windows\System32\guard64.dll

CopyTransHEICforWindows.dll was chosen first due to the nature of the application. The feedback from the user is that having renamed this DLL or uninstalled the associated product, Explorer didn't load it and the problem has gone.

HelpingHand
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