For past couple of days, somehow my laptop (Windows 7 Professional, 64bit) became very sluggish. I could not almost move my mice . Opening a folder or file would take forever to finish. Then later I noticed there were two explorer.exe processes, and one process used more than 4GB memory (private working set), which was shown from Windows Task Manager. At one point, I even tried using Free Commander as Windows Explorer replacement to see if I can avoid using Windows Explorer, but somehow I was not able to connect to the Internet when Free Commander was used. Then I had to search for a solution to fix Windows Explorer.
Looked like many people encountered similar problem. From tkw829’s reply from this post, I noticed the issue tkw829 encoutered was exactly what I saw. Then I tried tkw829’s approach (remove folder c:\programmdata\{9A88E103-A20A….}). It really worked for me. I did the fix almost an hour ago, Windows Explorer works much better since, and it only take ~36k memory, and I never saw the second explorer.exe process.
One thing I want to point out is that I did not have to resort to Linux mint as tkw829 did. When I initially tried deletion the folder c:\programmdata\{9A88E103-A20A….}, Windows complaint that Windows Explorer was using those files. Since I installed Free Commander ealier, I just opened Free Commander and used it to delete the folder and its content (both explorer.exe processes were first killed using Windows Task Mananger).
tkw829’s tip was really helpful.
Documentum DAA 