XP Explorer runaway

[aaronx1]

I have a new Gateway dual core, 1GB, WinXP Media Edition pile of junk. After booting up, it it becomes mostly unusable within a couple of hours due to Win Explorer gobbling up more than 50% of CPU resources. Re-booting calms the beast down for another couple of hours. After customer support could not resolve my problem, I painstakingly re-formatted and re-installed Win XP. The same problem returned. Please note that this is not due to a virus, adware or other nasty. Also note that it is not due to a corrupt .AVI file. The few I have are stored on a separate disc, play good, and not accessed when the problem occurs. I tried using a windows explorer replacement, but can't access my desktop or other programs. Hitting the windows logo flag thing does nothing. If nothing can fix this, do you know of a Win Explorer replacement that will let me access all programs and my desktop.

[cluberti]

I would suggest using Autoruns (from sysinternals.com) and ShellExView (from nirsoft.net) to disable all non-Microsoft startup items, services, and explorer shell extensions to see if the problem continues to occur. If it does, we'll have to get dumps of the process to see what is happening inside explorer.exe.

[LLXX]

Very likely a memory leak in a shell extension.

Explorer.exe itself doesn't leak memory.