Why are there so many duplicates of "explorer.exe" running?

Question

In my Windows 7 task manager, there are 16 instances of explorer.exe running. Where is this coming from?

I thought perhaps I had inadvertently enabled the option of Windows replicating an instance for every folder/window opened. But this isn't enabled. Nor do any further explorer's appear when I open new explorer (My Computer) windows.

Any ideas?

Solution

You might find this useful: multiple instances of explorer.exe running in task manager (currently 7)

In a nutshell one possible cause suggested in the above referenced link is that calling expolorer.exe (through shurtcut/command line and so on) with any argument other then default directory from Libraries will cause explorer task to hang when you close it.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the task manager, note the number of explorer.exe processes you have runnuing
2. Open command line
3. Run the following: explorer.exe C:\ - will result in a explorer window opened at C:\
4. Close the explorer window that opened as a result of step 3.
5. You should now note that you have another explorer.exe process still hanging in the background on top of the ones you already had.

On my computer (Win7 x64) the above steps resulted in a hanging explorer.exe process consuming about 12MB of memory each time.

BTW just for reference, to see a proper flow just call explorer.exe from the command line with no arguments.

Comments

[Daniel R Hicks]

Whatever the cause, it's generally not good or useful.