PC Gurus help-WinXP Memory leaks, Explorer??

[CyberDyneSystems]

My system which runs like absolute clockwork has one flaw.

It has a serious memory leak and CPU hog lose in there somewhere.

I am completely Virus and Spyware free..
Task manager reveals a scant 22 running processes before I launch anything.

There is nothing in my startup.. etc...

However,. anytime i get to editing images eventually it all slows to a crawl.
Today I noticed something I had not before,.. I went to task manager and at that point things had slowed so much that it took a lot of time for Task manager to even open...

"Explorer" was using up 100MB of ram and 99% CPU usage??

I killed explorer... the desktop went blank as it does,.I waited a bout 60 seconds,. and then restarted explorer... and all was back to normal.

Does anyone have any Ideas what would trigger explorer to start sucking up 99% of my CPU cycles?

The only thing that is consistently involved is PSCS.. this never happens unless I am using it.

I do not and have never used PSCS image browser whatever the heck that is called.

Thanks

[cmM]

What percentage of memory did you set PS to use? (general preferences -> memory and image cache). If that's too high (90% or something like that) then no memory left for the OS and whatever other application and that could be one of the reasons... just a guess

[CyberDyneSystems]

I've got 1GB of RAM and PSCS can have 70 percent.

The 99% CPU usage that explorer took was after PSCS had been closed.

[JSolie]

Hmmm...Fast computer, plenty of RAM, Windows, slowness and RAM gobbling... Pity there aren't better OS choices for PC's...

Is "Indexing" turned on for any of your hard drives? Not sure if this will help or not...

Also curious about virtual memory. Is your hard drive activity light pegged when your machine is suffering its malaise?

-- John

[CyberDyneSystems]

... It's not pegged,. but there is usualy some very slow paging going on.. if the hard drive led looked like this for fast activity;
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

...when this is going on it looks more like this;

* - - - - * - - - - * - - - -*

Can't recall where the setting for indexing is. but I seem to recall turning it off. It's certainly the type of thing I would turn off. (Office's fast find etc.. is all given the boot as well)

[JSolie]

The performance tab on the task manager shows something about pagefile usage. If anything, this could show if explorer.exe is just burning up swap. As for why... ? ? ? Does the machine settle down and return to normal after a bit, or does it stay crazy until you reboot it?

-- John

[bigun]

I'm not a guru but i had this prob once and come to find out i had a bad memory module. not sure if that will help. good luck.

Bigun