SlasherKG

Join Date 01/2006

Memory Leak and programs use alot of RAM

Hi all, I recently bought WindowBlinds 5 and love it. My only problem is that overnight (or after a couple of hours) explorer starts to use up alot of RAM. I see it continually grow over time. When it reaches 150MB I start to lose boarders and menu painting. If I run a program that uses alot of RAM (such as Newsleecher and/or Azureus) it happens faster. I've tried adding those programs to the ignore list, but that seems to have little/no effect. I'm using a skin that has transparency so I think it has something to do with a memory leak somewhere in windowsblinds' interaction with explorer.exe. Anyone notice this too?

I've tried the latest beta .11 and it still does it, I also now have an issue where initial loadup of the taskbar and applications (when windows starts) is slower and hangs for a few minutes until fully loaded.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the shell (explorer) process will sometims crash and restart. I know that none of this happnes with WB unloaded...

My Specs: Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB DDR-400 RAM, 128MB Geforce 6600GT, Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (XP Pro SP2)

Wblind.dll     2006/01/19 11:37:36
Wbsrv.dll     2005/12/20 22:57:44
Wbconfig.exe     2005/12/05 18:42:52
Wbload.exe     2006/01/19 11:37:42
Wbhelp.dll     2004/09/18 16:37:00
Wbui.dll     2005/12/06 21:29:06
Tray.dll     2005/11/02 13:28:26

windowblinds

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Join Date 10/2001

+21

What Anti-Vir you are using?

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Norton 2006

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NightTrainthedark

Join Date 07/2003

+255

I have experienced the same issues. I got the 6600GT card as well. Running Mcafee 8.0.46....engine version 4.4.00
I am constantly applying and changing skins so I expect things to hiccup from time to time. I have noticed the 6600GT comes up with alot of the issues people have reported.

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Daiwa

Join Date 07/2001

+351

Posts in other threads on the 6600GT have suggested running the 77.71 set of Detonator drivers as more recent versions have been a problem on that model (for 2D apps). If you have 8x.xx drivers installed & don't need the newer drivers for gaming reasons, might try that.

Cheers,
Daiwa

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Well, it doesn't happen without WB though. Also, the 8x.xx drivers are the only drivers that seem to be stable with Media Center. I'm gonna try reinstalling the Media Center drivers (81.98) and see if it does anything, but I still feel it's an issue with WB itself. I'd like to hear from stardock on this issue...

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Daiwa

Join Date 07/2001

+351

It's an issue with the driver-WB interaction - nothing's ever a problem until it affects something else - nVidia did something with those drivers that varied from the way they were doing 2d before, throwing a curve WB's way that wasn't expected, which seemed to only affect certain models/GPU's, the 6600GT being the biggie, I guess. WB does place greater demands on the GPU & drivers. Least that's the way I understand it, non-tech that I am. The WB developer is aware of the problem if I'm not mistaken - I think it was Neil who posted the suggestion to roll back to the 77.71's. Don't know if that specifically applied to MCE or not, but I think that's the OS he runs.

Cheers,
Daiwa

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

SlasherKG: Do you use nview? (under desktop management on the nvidia settings panel)

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Yes, I do have nview enabled, but only for small things such as the menu extensions and preventing windows from opening offscreen and preventing spanning. I've just removed the 81.98 drivers, I was going to install 77.77, but I noticed that 77.79 is a Media Center driver, do you think that would be ok? Or should I try 77.77?

EDIT: Well, for testing purposes I went with 77.77 and did not enable nView. I'll run it overnight and see if there's any difference.

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Well, it's not a driver issue. Sorry to say it happened again with 77.77 and nView disabled. I really need to get this figured out... or else I've wasted $20.

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Uhm, try updating to NEWEST drivers... 81.98 is the newest... http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxpmce_81.98.html

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

Is it just explorer which increases its ram usage over time?

If so, what explorer addins do you have on your PC?

If you open a command prompt & run tasklist /M > log.txt it will make a log.txt file containing useful information. Please e-mail this to neil@stardock.com

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Uh, sorry to say astyanax1, but I had already been using those prior to this...

To Neil, yes it is only explorer, it will start out fine, around 25MB, then grow to 35, then 45, then it will stay there for a while, then sometimes I've seen it at 150MB! Explorer randomly will restart and/or borders and menus will stop drawing when this happens, or if I notice it before then, I have to do it manually to have borders and menus draw properly. I'm sending you the log now.

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Well, I've been up for about 24 hours or so without it happening, I'm explorer is up to about 45MB of RAM right now (still higher than normal) and I'm fairly sure that it's because I haven't used the newsleecher program (or any other program that uses alot of RAM at once). I'll keep monitoring to see what causes it and probably provide you with another tasklist log if I can catch explorer at the high RAM usage before it crashes.

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I think WB5 just uses a lot of resources than without. That's why my computer stalls whenever I open more than a few windows. No problems with it unloaded.

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Ok, now I can't use Media Center without it happening, so I think I'm going to have to give up on WindowBlinds. Sorry to say I've wasted 20 bucks. You're progress is impressive, but version 5 is still a bit too unstable.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

I use MCE all the time with WB5 using the nvidia drivers without any problems at all.

I think it has to be an explorer addin thats upsetting things.

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Alright, you might be on the right track. I've uninstalled alot of the Power Toys that I installed from Microsoft (including an "Open Command Prompt Here" extension, a slide show generator, an alternative graphical Task Switch for alt+tab, and a color editor), I'm not sure which one might be causing the problem (my theory right now is the Task Switcher) but it seems even when using Newsleecher at 77MB of RAM, explorer seems to have settled at 38MB (which is actually what it was before loading up Newsleecher).

So, now my question to you is, what is your experience with the alt+tab Task Switch reploacer from Microsoft, if you've even ever come across it?

And also, what does your explorer.exe process average on your system?

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Neil, just something I'd like to mention. When I saw this thread I decided to take a look and see what my explorer task was doing. For me, it's not increasing in the amount of memory it uses, but I noticed that it uses 2% of CPU usage every other second... constantly. It's like a ticking clock. With that said, with WB unloaded this doesn't happen. Also, I wonder if this is contributing to the CPU speed maxing I mentioned earlier in the "Everyone with Laptops" thread. Please take a closer look at this.

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Neil Banfield

Join Date 04/2001

+1105

JRSCCivic98: More likely its being caused by the taskmanager icon changing every so often. This forces large parts of the taskbar to repaint.

Its very unlikely that would cause a CPU to not decrease its speed. If it did then the power management would be useless as it would never drop (your PC is never totally idle)

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I did notice yesterday that sometimes it won't go into screensaver mode. Sometimes it does and then it comes out of it by itself... almost like something is going on in the background. Also, it never turns off the screen anymore... like it's setup to do.

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hmm, well, I notice the CPU usage too, but my screen turns off properly, so I'm not sure that's related to this same issue. However, I still have the RAM issue with explorer restarting, I guess I'll just have to live with it for now, it's only an annoyance really, as all the task icons seem to come back after the restart. If you have any ideas, let me know.

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