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explorer.exe Have I picked up a virus?

#1 Burlroad

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Posted 30 May 2009 - 01:11 PM

I'm running WXP Home Edition on a older Gateway laptop. While trying to determine why my machine was booting so slowly, I spotted "explorer.exe" as a running process occupying 40.8MB of RAM. When I tried to determine if this file is a genuine MS process, I got widely conflicting answers through Google. I've scanned my machine with Norton, Panda, and MS AV scanners and gotten clean bills of health. However, when I searched for this file to see where it was located, it didn't show up as a 40MB+ file. The "explorer.exe" files I found were only slightly over 1MB. Am I missing something here?

#2 hamluis

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Posted 30 May 2009 - 01:37 PM

File size...has nothing to do with RAM utilization by that file.

One is static, the other dynamic.

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#3 garmanma

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Posted 30 May 2009 - 03:37 PM

Explorer.exe is your Desktop
You get conflicting answers because any legitimate file could be the problem.
It all depends on the location of the file in question
f the path of this file does NOT show up as C:\Windows\Explorer.exe or C:\WinNT\Explorer.exe above, then you most probably have a virus

Mark

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