Explorer - high memory usage

[UCyborg]

It was fine just a week ago, but today, my PC hit 100 days of uptime and I noticed explorer.exe launches with 200 MB of RAM consumption just showing an empty desktop and a taskbar. Then it goes up with time, I got to about 440 MB yesterday. My usage patterns haven't changed, I just updated GPU drivers, but that was on 5th of October.

Just wondering if anyone encountered this and if the reboot solved it and if not, what was done to fix it?

Looking at the changelog of newer updates, the build I'm on now has quite some (unrelated, hopefully) issues, but I'm not feeling confident about updating immediately as there's always something. They never tell you what they broke, they just say they fixed something which at some point was actually working properly. I'll wait until the next patch Tuesday at least.

Anyway. two more things that might be related or might not be; sometime after 70 days of uptime, I had to disable AppX Deployment Service because it was making my computer unusable, it ran at logon and got stuck in some messed up state that it wasn't even able to accept stop command while grinding the disk non-stop. If left unattended, Process Hacker would count several gigabytes of read data. After terminating its process, it stayed quiet.

The second thing, Process Hacker shows 1,14 GB of crap in the page file while Task Manager reads 1,4 GB of paged pool usage. I remember this was much worse with Windows 8.1, the numbers were rising about 3x times faster. Some background system process leaking memory? I don't know if it would happen with previous Windows versions with my setup because I almost never ran them for more than a day.

[UCyborg]

I forgot I messed with SecureUxTheme...I set it to load in Explorer and since it's loaded through a feature intended for debugging, the memory usage was high because of that.

[UCyborg]

When did those 3 years pass?

One constant I'm experiencing with Win10 regarding memory usage, memory leak in kernel space especially apparent when not rebooting in months. Seeing it on different computers. Though I really only tried to analyze it on my home desktop and that didn't lead me anywhere.

Another laptop at home is running 1903, I just rebooted it recently, last fresh boot was about 1 year and 4 months ago. Pagefile accumulated almost 5 GB of data if I remember correctly. Don't quote on exact GB regarding pagefile, but one svchost.exe hosting multiple Windows services was showing about 9 GB in Process Hacker's Private Bytes column. OK, that was user space, but regardless, non-paged pool was over 0,5 GB, it's about 0,1 GB on fresh boot.

The laptop has just enough memory below the default threshold that makes Windows group multiple service in single process rather than split them in multiple processes, so didn't get to see the exact service that accumulated as much as it did. The only other instance when I've seen crazy values in Process Hacker relative to the actual available memory was when running games specifying 6 GB of minimum RAM in system requirements on a 4 GB system.