Windows explorer.exe using alot of memory.

Well, I assume you don't play games, if your using ME. So why not switch over to an easy linux distro like Suse, Mandrake, or Linspire? I believe at least one of those has a live disc, so you can try it out without formatting your HDD. They should be really easy to get to grips with, and you'll probably prefer them as OS'.

 

That's the route I'm headed towards, albiet slowly. I've got one linux box up and running on Caldera (ewwww, SCO), and hopefully by the time I'm ready to start buying hardware I'll be comfortable enough with linux to use it on my primary machine.
Until then, I'm quite fond of my ME machines. In my mind, ME was the crown jewel of the 9x line, with the ease of use of 98SE, but a lot more stable. I install it straight off the disc, no need for SPs and compatibility issues. To each their own I suppose.

 

Just FYI, on my work PC, although my explorer.exe is only using ~20mb RAM, it's also using 28mb of my page file... That's probably your 50mb then...
(XP SP1, only 256mb ram)

I've also found a reference to 'netshellicon' in my registry:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Search Assistant\ACMru\5603]
"000"="netshellicon"
(although there is no actual file found anywhere)

- Pretty fresh build here, and no obvious issues - not slow or anything, even with Symantec and zonelabs running with all my other $hite...

Sounds like there's something else going on here... changing shell probably won't help!

 

Hey, those stats are nothing, mine is currently running at 19mb, but it can get up to 120+MB,

I've just started to investigate (which is why Im here). Might run through some of my programs to try and find when it does it.

 

my explorer.exe is only 13k with xp +sp2