Computers MAAAAAAD RAM Usage

I'm having this problem lately. It's been persisting for about a week, I believe.
I'm running Windows XP, and explorer.exe keeps going into ridiculous amounts of RAM usage, much higher than is probably healthy, and my computer keeps crashing. Both Task Manager and CachemanXP are telling me that explorer is using on average 60 to 100 MB of RAM, sometimes (but rarely) as little as 40 MB, and sometimes as high as 120.
What is going on here? Any suggestions on what I can do about this?
(please don't say a reformat ... backing up my hard drive again is not in the budget)

 

Actually, I'm having the same problem, with the same system specs. I, too, would like to know why it keeps doing this.

 

I just managed to fix the problem. Maybe what worked for me will work for you.

I found a large video file which could not be opened by any programs. When I tried deleting it, I received an error saying it was in use by another process.
So I restarted the computer in Safe Mode. The RAM consumption problem followed me there. I tried deleting this file again, still it did not work. So, I opened the command prompt, killed explorer using task manager, and then deleted the file. This time it worked.
Then I restarted again, and here I am. RAM for explorer is now at a steady 21 MB.

I thought it was something like this ... maybe that will help you too?

 

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what most of that meant. I'm not exactly modern-computer-science literate.

 

Neither am I.
See, my problem originated from a video file that I downloaded from the network here at school. When I tried to run it, Windows Media Player told me some error message and said it couldn't open it. I got the same results from Winamp and DivX Player.
Then the RAM problems hit like the day after.
Finally (as in like just after I started this thread), it occured to me to delete the file. Then Windows told me I couldn't because it was in use, which I thought was odd because earlier it was telling me that I couldn't use it.
If you have such a file, I wouldn't mind giving you a step-by-step of what I did (it's pretty simple). Of course, if your problem doesn't come from some file like this, then your problem's probably something different and best left for the experts.

 

Okay, if that's the case, then no, my problem is something different. I've not had that sort of problem with video files before.

EDIT: I found the problem, it's been fixed.

 

Yaaaaaay! Hooray for us!!

 

You could try upping your virtual memory. My computer has been chugging, so I'm going to see if this works for me.. It was at 671 megs, but I put it up to 1.5 gigs. And sometimes my computer just totally transforms into a 386, that's when I system restore.

 

It was some spyware that latched itself to the underside of the Windows OS. I HATE spyware. >_<

 

........

my explorer.exe is taking 20,000KB and up ((from my RAM)). why?

From before it was taking 10,000KB and DOWN