Uhhh, pretend I am a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather (close enough in computer terms) and use little words.
I know you're NOT though, so I don't treat you (or anyone) thus... but, sometimes, the problem w/ this field & many others is, there are a LOT of technical terms & 'acronyms' (PkZipped English, lol)...
I never fuss with BIOS or registry or things geeky people do for fun. My computer is a tool, it enables me to do email, word processing, play solitaire, post on political opinion boards and surf the net for news and the odd naughty picture. I am 54 years old. Although I have been on the net since 1995, I have no programming skills. I follow directions well (Mensa) but computer innards just never appealed to me, much like the internal workings of my car's engine never appealed enough to me to learn advanced mechanics. My passions lie elsewhere.
Fair enough - you're the one who's "NORMAL" imo, rather than PC-hotrodders... lol, we're the 'strange ones' imo!
I do the automatic updates from MS, and I also regularly (weekly) check HP (my computer's manufacturer) for any updates they have, even though they email me if there is anything new I need to update. I do the things people recommend non-programming neanderthals such as I should do for overall computer maintenance (such as keeping the inside of the case clean, updates, defraggin the hard drives, antivirus and antispy and all that).
Well, sometimes, that's NOT enough (well, it's enough to get basic function w/ Windows install disk native drivers that is) - to get full no bug function, updating your BIOS &/or motherboard drivers (usually, a Cd-Rom comes w/ it containing these & they are better than the MS ones, for getting ALL YOU CAN out of your motherboard & equipment).
Plus, motherboard manufacturers & chipset makers FREQUENTLY update BIOS' & the driversets I speak of (VIA, NForce, etc.) so, looking for the "latest/greatest" & applying them can't hurt, in ANY regards... even IF this is not the fix for this.
It is just that suddenly, explorer.exe started using a massive amount of memory whenever I ran a search. I thought maybe there was a software conflict of some sort. I did not know a slow drive or the bios could cause that, but then, that is to be expected.
Thanks.
This is why I asked IF you had added more programs, or data in files, lots of it... this COULD imo theoretically, make your search in Explorer.exe have to make whatever datastructures/variables it uses MUCH LARGER as it 'sifts thru' the contents on the diskdrives in question.
QUESTION - when you search, are you searching ALL OF YOUR DISKS? See if this happens if you only search say, 1 disk (not Cd-Roms, just a single harddisk)... it may show us IF I am correct or not on this account, by making a far smaller dataset for it to search thru.
Heck, if you only have 1 harddisk, then search a single directory only (like C:\WINDOWS) & see if it does this to you again, just for experimentation's sake...
GOOD LUCK!
APK
P.S.=> The reason I am asking this is, you state the memory usage STAYS UP, after the search is done... it very well may be that the diskcache is holding whatever data it touched after, & is NOT 'letting go' of it like it ought to, @ least not right away... apk