explorer.exe taking up high amounts of memory and cpu

[Luke Winship]

Do not know whats causing it, have tried almost everything, would appreciate some help, thanks

 

[plaintuts]

What have you tried so far?

 

[Luke Winship]

What have you tried so far?

quite a lot, at the minute I have explorer.exe closed so I can at least function on my PC without it being slow, I don't suspect it to be a virus but I don't know what else it could be

 

[plaintuts]

That's kinda odd, explorer.exe is the desktop gui application, closing it should stop desktop functions

Run a virus scan

 

[Luke Winship]

That's kinda odd, explorer.exe is the desktop gui application, closing it should stop desktop functions

Run a virus scan

seems to have worked for now, for anyone wondering I used MalwareBytes Anit-Malware in safe mode

 

[Otto Normalverbraucher]

What have you tried so far?

quite a lot, at the minute I have explorer.exe closed so I can at least function on my PC without it being slow, I don't suspect it to be a virus but I don't know what else it could be

I had this problem, too. And now it is STILL not 100% resolved, BUT:
a) Directx has something with it and if you're lucky you may "update" the DirectX from Microsoft (try that small online-updater)
b) Explorer.exe is disturbed by the problems with the DirectX. Explorer.exe is a COMPONENT of the Internet Explorer, so try to go back to IE that is embedded in Windows Vista/7/8. That brings the Explorer.exe back to normal and LOWERS the DirectX -number in the Registry.
That "going-back" can be achived by "Update/ installed updates => deinstall IE 11" direct there in the list -you know the rest.
c) Restart the PC and so on-- and after that try to install DirectX offline June-2010 redist /dowload from Microsoft.
d) look with "Vindows Update" to get on the list the IE 11 again and install it again
e) Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) => Processes =>explorer.exe => stop it / down-right on the screen "End process"
Go to Task Manager in the same session and look for "Aplications =>"New Task..." again down-right there
Write Explorer.exe there and reactivate the Explorer.exe.
f) get out of all windows and RESTART the PC
If you still have some problems, see the resources from the ATI or nVidia (special this f* nVidia!), mouse and sound. Always problems when the USBs share the IRQs whit the grafic or sound. For such "collided resources" are other advisors on Net that have already resolved these things.
I hope it brings the computer some 99% back to normal.
BUT THE BEST SOLUTION would be "Happy Uninstall 6.25" that takes out DirectX and reinstall it without the help of my "list" up here 🙂 (Well who has the money, can do it. The Happy Uninstall under 5.* are no help, because they cannot resolve something else except XP and let the fingers from the so called crack-pages: there are only Happy Uninstall-offers from some pigs that try to plant you their private downloaders with the usual garbage: Conduit & the same)
I hope all this it helps you, till you find a programmer with a better solution than.. "do a clean reinstall of Windows" 🙂)
Regards from a poor lamer, as you see

 

[tkw829]

I ran into a similar problem and looked on google and found that this seems to be happening to lots of people. The solution for me was to delete a directory under c:\programdata

it will looks something like this {9A88E103-A20A....}

I actually could not delete it from within windows even in safe mode. I was able to boot into Linux Mint and rename the directory. There were also 3 registry entries that pointed to that directory so I'm guessing it is redundant. Anyway renaming that folder solved my issue.

By the way the symptoms for me were that a 2nd explorer.exe process would start up once the computer was fully started and then it would start a ctfmon.exe thread and then the memory usage would just accelerate until all memory was used.