Hello, I have a question about programmes that seem to hog my laptop's memory.

I am an active and knowledgeable user of Windows XP Home but I am not
an IT person. The programmes I use most days are Norton, Internet
Explorer, Excel, Word, Outlook, iTunes, PaintShopPro, Skype and
Acrobat Reader. I have 512MB of RAM, a 1.6GHz Centrino laptop. My
startup list is practically empty. I often check Processes and
Performance in the Task Manager and have the following questions:

1. I often find Word, Skype and iTunes (or programmes related to it)
running even after I have shut them down, taking up about 35MB and
20MB for the first two. When Internet Explorer becomes very slow to
load pages, and I kill these services in the Processes window, it
seems to have an immediate impact. How can I force them to release the
memory automatically?

2. Msmsgs.exe: I do not use MSN at all but this programme seems to be
running all the time, taking up about 7MB. If I kill it in the
Processes window, it goes away, but then comes back later. It is not
in my MSConfig startup list and it is disabled in Administrative
Tools/Services. How can I get rid of it for good?

3. Explore.exe
This is always running, taking up about 30MB. I googled it and it
seems to be a virus/worm or something like undesirable like that.
Norton and Spybot are happy with it. When I kill it, I lose my
taskbar(Start button and the rest) so it seems useful but what does it
do?

Many thanks

NB: this is the first time I use Google Answers, can someone tell them
how dreadful their text editor is?

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Clarification of Question by pdpd-ga on 18 May 2006 10:24 PDT

Forgot to mention another offender: Outlook. Sometimes it refuses to
save or send a message. I close Outlook, but there is still an Outlook
process running. As long as I do not kill that process manually in the
Task Manager, I will not be able to send any message from Outlook.
Thanks

It is not 'explore.exe' it is 'explorer.exe'

That is known as the 'Shell' - more realistically it is the program
that supplies the Desktop.

The problem is simple to solve,first open msn messenger and then in
preferences( go to tools->options->preferences) you will see that
there will be an option saying the program will start on startup
uncheck that,also uncheck the option which says the application will
run in the background.Also go to msconfig and disable Itunes and
Skype.also go to preferences in those applications and disable the
option which says the application will run on startup(same as previous
msn messenger).Also the process is explorer.exe which is the Windows
explorer as frde pointed out,u cannot disable it.if u still have any
problems contact me at bhuvanendra@gmail.com,i will help u out in any
way i can,though i might be a little late in posting replies.

Many things can cause this...

First for things like iTunes, that could be quicktime that is running.
If you have it setup to run (i believe it is called) quicktask on
start up, and when you go to lets say a webpage with a video that runs
in quicktime, it will start the background task. There are many apps
that do the same sort of thing.

You might consider openning MSCONFIG and uncheck some of the things
you don't need. To do so follow these instructions:

Click Start>Run (if run is not present press CTRL+ALT+DEL and click
File>New Task...)
Type: "msconfig" into the box (without quotes)
In the start up tab un check the ones you don't want.

You can also do this with some of your services, but not recommended.
If the program has the ability in the options to turn it off, you
should do it that way. You should also be very carefull when selecting
the things you do not want, because it can cause unwanted things to
occure.

If you have programs that don't shut down correctly, there is not much
you would beable to do to correct it (without openning taskmanager and
ending process). Your problem could also be in a virus or something
similer. This may seem extreme, but you could reinstall windows or try
an antivirous.

Hope that helps,
-tegreatall (ALL)

Hello all who commented. Apologies for not responding earlier. I kept
waiting for an answer from Google but kept getting nothing, not
realising that further down the screen you guys had posted comments.
Many thanks for your help.