I'm not using the regular windows explorer for anything at all, just to show the desktop. Yet it consumes up to 120M of memory during startup, settling down to anywhere between 17 and 30M later. Using FileMon I discovered it scans all the directories of anything that has an icon on the desktop, startup menu or the taskbar. Some of the apps I have there go several directories deep, including VFP 8 and 9.

Not that it takes forever to start up, but it continues to plow my disks minutes after showing the desktop.

I'd understand it checking my icons and looking for bitmaps, and even checking for the files the icons point to (though that's what it doesn't do: it caches them, so an exe that got deleted would still have a regular icon), but checking each file deep down... what for? I have also turned off the indexing on all my disks and disabled it as a service.

Is there a way to trim this down, if not to outright kill it?