strange behavour of EXPLORER.EXE

[Pendragon]

My laptop has been misbehaving.
The machine has been slowing down and becoming unresponsive. To my surprise EXPLORER.EXE has become a system hog. Taking all available CPU time and increasing amounts of RAM.
CPU 97% - 98%
RAM increasing steadily from 17,000k up to 85,000K I've see it even go upto 120,000K

With some experimenting I have isolated it to one directory. If I open this particular directory EXPLORER.EXE gets it's knickers in a bunch...

The only way around the problem that I can find is to either Logoff, re-boot or "end process" If I do nothing then it just gets worse, more and more RAM is consumed by the ever hungry EXPLORER.EXE

The directory in question is the download DIR for KaZaA lite. I thought it may be because contents of the DIR are constantly changing. Even when KaZaA lite has been closed, and then I look in the DIR the problem starts again...


P4 2GHz
512Mb RAM
WinXP Pro + SP1

[Matridom]

/me shakes his magic ball.


The ball responds..

Virus....

[Ferrit]

Gee the kazaa directory well
how could such a great program ever cause errors or use up sytem resources.
I mean it isnt like the software carries with it tons of spyware ?No thats not enuff for the average user.
It also carries along with it all the rest of the dorks out there trading files with no anti virus protection
Gee using alot of resources this has to be a mircrosoft error for sure

Clean the spyware/virus/trojan/scripts off yer system

[mrwilhelm]

Actually Kazaalite is spyware free (thus the "lite" part of it's monicker).

I will agree though... downloading files from any peer to peer network without a good virus scanner is a lot like sleeping around without a condom. Very high risk and not a good practice at all in this day and age.

[Ferrit]

He did say Kazaa lite but the rest is very very true

[Pendragon]

Virus... well I have Norton AV 2003 with all updates, running... Full system scan last night, no virus found.

A strange virus that dose nothing untill you open a directory. Not open anything within the directory, just look at the directory contents...

[Pendragon]

Just had another look...
Opened the directory in command line, nothing obviosly wrong. No unexpected file extentions, nothing strange about the attributes of the files... and the correct number of *.dat files.

P.S. KaZaA lite has it's own AV built in

[NooNoo]

Why is it that people think that Kazaa is never the problem?

[Pendragon]

I'm not sugesting that KaZaA isn't the problem, it's just that this is a very strange way for it to show up. You normal have to have a program running for it to cause a problem...

This problem still happens when KaZaA isn't running.
Only when you use explorer to view the contents of this directory...

[Darkstar]

I had the same problem a while back. Big Divx movies were the culprit, as XP has trouble getting their file information, causing explorer.exe to jump to 100%. Since you've mentioned Kazaa...

Try this (at your own risk, of course).

AVI files using 100% of the CPU:
Start -> Run -> type in: Regedit
Find the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shel lex\PropertyHandler\ directory and delete the "DEFAULT" key

Maybe reboot after this.

Good luck

[Pendragon]

Thanks you solved the problem... Very strange though.

[Darkstar]

Aye. Glad you fixed it, though.