Yuck - I had that problem where the explorer.exe kept climbing and my laptop would act like junk and I would have to reboot. Most advice I got was "relaod and reinstall"
I don’t even think I still have all the software on my laptop, so I was desperate. A two week-long process of spyware, malware, virus and memory leak investigation and troubleshooting got me back to a pretty good state, and I learned alot. A few things:
ONE
The Panda we used found a virus that was causing much of the trouble for me – unfortunately, Panda did not have signature for it until yesterday (Mcafee still doesn’t) You can tell when you have it by opening the task manager and looking at the processes and seeing if your explorer.exe is growing steadily for no reason. It should be somewhere around 20,000k. For that matter you should never have any process that is steadily increasing RAM consumption when your not doing anything. The file specifically holding the virus was CHUPV.DLL
TWO
If you have ANY of these files in you windows or windows subdirectories – then you’ve got some nasty malware that spybot/adware can’t find and you need to start in safe mode to delete:
CHUP32.DLL
CHUPV.DLL
TXDB32.DLL
SRPCSRV32.DLL
SPOOLSRV32.EXE
I would still download the latest adaware SE and the new spybot (both free) BUT clean your cookies and cache before you run then otherwise you’ll have a ton of stupid hits to sort through. It will find a lot of stuff.
THREE
Most shareware doesn’t have a clue about windows memory management, so it causes HUGE memory leaks that occur under memory intensive programs like (Visio and Photoshop) so I found a great free program called Clean RAM that is also free. You run it after you’ve been using Windows for a few hours, and it goers and retrieves all the memory lost to memory leaks – works really good (stops me from having to reboot after doing the Visio/Photoshop/Netobjects thing)
The link is http://www.nomorehistory.com/clean_ram.html It is free, but you can buy the professional edition (I didn’t the free version works fine for me)
FOUR
Finally, my machine got a new lease on life by fixing the over 600 registry problems it found by buying a program called registry mechanic
Hope this helps someone - My machine is like new.
