Any solutions for the explorer.exe memory leak?

Stigg said:

I'm not sure how many people notice it, but I sometimes see explorer.exe restart itself.

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Devlin1888 said:

I'd imagine everyone would notice it, The taskbar and any open folders etc close straight away. Unless theyre afk of course

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Almighty1 said:

Not really, I have never seen explorer.exe close or crash because that's another issue as whenever explorer.exe crashes or restarted, you will notice the some of the system tray icons would be missing like nVidia's tray icons and Snagit for example.

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Devlin1888 said:

Nah what i meant is, Anytime explorer has/had crashed on me(Now that its no longer an issue for me) it closed the taskbar on both monitors and any open windows that explorer was using. Im not sure how you wouldn't notice that unless you weren't looking at the time. It was an issue with the builds for a while im sure, Not everyone had the issue like most of them

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Almighty1 said:

Not sure if that is a actual crash though because I do notice the taskbar does disappear but when explorer.exe really crashes or even when you restart the process, it will always not show all the system tray icons unless you manually restart the processes either by restarting or killing and then starting them manually. For all we know, it could be a resource leak from certain apps that is causing it. Just like MSMoneyquotes.exe works fine for me in Windows 10 but in Windows 11, the process will eventually die on it's own when it feels like it, hard to say if it's the app itself or if it's windows killing it.

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Almighty1 said:

Not really, I have never seen explorer.exe close or crash because that's another issue as whenever explorer.exe crashes or restarted, you will notice the some of the system tray icons would be missing like nVidia's tray icons and Snagit for example.

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Stigg said:

explorer.exe crashes for me from time to time and restarts. I can't work out why.
But you're right, some tray app icons don't return.
I have to go to Task Manager and end those apps, then restart them to restore the tray icon.

I'm not too concerned about the tray icons not returning after an explorer.exe restart. That is probably something to do with specific apps and the way they're coded. I'm more concerned about explorer.exe crashing and restarting. I didn't have this problem with Windows 10.

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Almighty1 said:

You're probably right about how the apps are coded. That's why I use Process Hacker over Task Manager since I can go through the list and restart what is no longer running. nVidia Settings would be one that disappears which can be restarted by right clicking on the desktop and then nVidia Control Panel and then go through the toggling of display options. For all I know. the issue with Explorer.exe crashing may be tied to dwm.exe having a memory leak from the Intel HD 630 GPU drivers as mentioned at dwm.exe uses memory leakage with Intel HD Graphics 630 & others

So it seems like there is the explorer restarting without killing any of the system tray icons and then there is one where it kills the system tray icons like when you restart the explorer.exe process or kill and start the explorer.exe process.

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