I've noticed on my quad core system, that explorer runs at 25% cpu useage with this version over the prior one that ran at 3% useage.
Agreed, this means that one of your cores is being hit at 100% by Explorer (which is not multithreaded in this case). And the system is just reporting it spread over four CPUs (e.g. 100%/4=25%) by default.
My 8 core shows the same situation as yours in that it pegs one of the CPUs just by running...at 12.5%. I am indeed running Deskscapes but even when I pause it, nothing changes with explorer, e.g. 100% used.
It appears as though something in the program is constantly driving explorer.exe at 100% no matter what processes are running or even whether any windows are being dragged, etc. As soon as WindowFX is turned on, boom, 100% CPU in one core. When turned off, explorer crashes and then goes back to normal.
Note that I saw identical behavior with Deskscapes when I chose to use the "same animation on 3 monitors" option. To get around that, all I had to do was duplicate the same Deskscape 2 more times in the deskscapes directory (e.g. PhotoDreamA, PhotoDream B, and PhotodreamC) and then run each of these as if they were unique animations, one per monitor, per the normal Deskscapes interface. CPU usage dropped to normal levels, with negligible explorer.exe use and everything is now handled by the DSHost and DWM processes (as they should be).
This may mean that the issue lies at a core OS level (i.e. hardware accelleration is disabled and forcing explorer.exe to emulate in software, perhaps?) and that the only way to work around it is to run more than one WindowFX process (e.g. one per display card), the way Deskscapes does with individual animations.
Intriguing?
