dwm.exe very high memory usage

[winvispixp]

So yesterday I installed windows vista ultimate x64 in a vm in vmware player 16 and after enabling the aero theme I saw that dwm.exe is using like 200 MB of ram. A few minutes later I can see it at 1.2 GB (I gave the vm 4gb of ram in total) where it switches back to windows vista basic theme and now it's consuming about 2 MB.

Is anyone else having this problem? Last time I used vista in vmware (player 15 not 16 tho) it was behaving normal..

Reinstalled it twice and the same thing happens.

*No updates, just sp2 / fresh install using MSDN ISO and no other programs are installed*

[Win10-Hater]

Don't know why your VM behaves a little strangely, but on my main Vista laptop (fully updated till Jan. 2020) DWM always uses only about 30-40 megs of ram (out of 8 gigs). Maybe vmware tools causes memory usage to fluctuate.

[winvispixp]

UPDATE: I found the problem

The problem is vmware workstation 16 player. I've downgraded to version 15 and now everything works fine and also doesn't f*ck up vmware tools versions (player 16 downloaded vmware tools too new for windows vista and so you had to manually download the right ones)

Download link for vmware player 15.5.6 if anyone needs it: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/downloads/details?downloadGroup=PLAYER-1556&productId=800&rPId=47861

Edited November 19, 2020 by winvispixp