handle leak explorer.exe

How is the handle leak in explorer.exe affecting your computer?

Hi Christopher King

If the PC is running normally and there are no symptoms such as File Explorer crashes, steadily increasing memory usage, or performance degradation, there is likely no immediate cause for concern. However, if you want to verify whether the warning is a real issue or a false positive, you can monitor explorer.exe with Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer and watch the Handle Count over time.

A true handle leak would typically show the handle count continuously increasing without dropping. If problems develop later, third party shell extensions are a common area to investigate.

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Hi! It seems I got this issue as well! If this is uhhh useful to fix it, it's ok

On Windows 11 23H2, build 22631.5335 (non-insider), apparently I had it for 6 days open while opening and closing and the handles never returned back it just went up, then it ended at ~36,000 handles on ~1.8 GB then made the explorer I had open (with images) not respond and not be killable ("There is no running instance of the task"), nor did any new explorer window appear, and the taskbar and other stuff didn't work.

I tested this with the 7,582 handles and opening 10 explorers, and it went from 14,429 --> 12,763 with the leaked stuff per window:

• CommandStore registry keys: ~220 (none released)
• Event: ~185
• WaitCompletionPacket: ~40
• Thread: ~15
• ALPC Port ~12, Section ~5, IoCompletion ~5, Process ~1