Several explorer.exe's in Task Manager

[Avatar]

Sometimes I notice that there are several (20 - 50) explorer.exe
processes running on this Win 7 Pro x86 machine.
Does not affect performance but increases the number of running tasks in
Task Manager from the normal 40 to well over 100.
Have not been able to (so far) tie this with any specific activity or
operation.
What gives, any ideas anyone?
Regards and thanks in anticipation.
Avatar
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[Big Steel]

Sometimes I notice that there are several (20 - 50) explorer.exe
processes running on this Win 7 Pro x86 machine.
Does not affect performance but increases the number of running tasks in
Task Manager from the normal 40 to well over 100.
Have not been able to (so far) tie this with any specific activity or
operation.
What gives, any ideas anyone?
Regards and thanks in anticipation.

There should only be one running, unless you are opening many of them.
Well, that's how it works on my machine no matter how many time I try to
open explorer on one process for explorer is running.


You should right click one of them in Task Manager and go to Properties
to see what directory it's running from. If it's not C:\Windows, it
could be malware.

 

[Avatar]

There should only be one running, unless you are opening many of them.
Well, that's how it works on my machine no matter how many time I try to
open explorer on one process for explorer is running.


You should right click one of them in Task Manager and go to Properties
to see what directory it's running from. If it's not C:\Windows, it
could be malware.

Thanks for your quick response.
Every one of them is the original explorer executable in the C:\Windows
directory.
I have opened, at most, two or three Explorer windows simultaneously
sometimes to compare files or such. Never so many - no reason to!
The mystery continues...

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

Thanks for your quick response.
Every one of them is the original explorer executable in the C:\Windows
directory.
I have opened, at most, two or three Explorer windows simultaneously
sometimes to compare files or such. Never so many - no reason to!
The mystery continues...

I only have one explorer.exe process running. I only have one no matter
how many Explorer windows I have open, or even if none are open.

 

[Char Jackson]

Sometimes I notice that there are several (20 - 50) explorer.exe
processes running on this Win 7 Pro x86 machine.
Does not affect performance but increases the number of running tasks in
Task Manager from the normal 40 to well over 100.
Have not been able to (so far) tie this with any specific activity or
operation.
What gives, any ideas anyone?

In Windows Explorer, under Tools -> Folder Options -> View, do you
have the option checked to "Launch each folder window in a new
process"? (or whatever it's called, I'm trying to recall it from
memory since I'm not on a Win 7 machine at the moment.)

Even if you do, it seems like a process spawned that way should be
killed when its window is closed, so I don't know.

 

[fuzzy]

Sometimes I notice that there are several (20 - 50) explorer.exe
processes running on this Win 7 Pro x86 machine.
Does not affect performance but increases the number of running tasks in
Task Manager from the normal 40 to well over 100.
Have not been able to (so far) tie this with any specific activity or
operation.
What gives, any ideas anyone?
Regards and thanks in anticipation.
Avatar

As I lived it, multiple explorer.exe processes was caused by my
WinExplorer shortcut target being one that Win7 (Vista too?) doesn't
like. I was using the target recommended for previous Windows
versions to open at a specific location. In my case I wanted to open
at E:\Hold2, so the shortcut target was c:\windows\explorer.exe
/n,/e,e:\hold2\. That shortcut resulted in multiple explorer.exe
processes - when explorer was closed the process kept running and
executing the shortcut again resulted in another process being
started, and so on.

The solution for me was to go to the folder where I wanted Explorer to
open and create a shortcut which I moved to the appropriate toolbar.
The shortcut target then was/is E:\Hold2 - no more multiple instances
of the explorer.exe process.

Worked for me.