Recent RAM Issue with Windows 7 - Memory Slowly Fills Up

Solution 1:

Edit: It seems I've solved my problem.

I'm going to go through this pretty detailed just in-case someone else may have the same issue at one time and finds this and it works for them.

I had ESET SmartSecurity 4 installed, as well as True Image Home 2013 by Acronis. I ended up using Driver Verifier (Just type in Verifier into your start bar. CAUTION: Can cause you to experience bluescreens if a driver is acting up. Please make a system restore point and have a Windows Recovery Disk handy to use or make sure you can get into safe mode and disable it via Commandline: verifier /reset).

So it detected a faulty driver after I disabled the Acronis TIB Mounter device, which is the device that mounts TIB backups in use with their "Before Boot" software which installs on your system and also seems to control all of the functionality of your USB drives as well, which I did not know. This driver which was from Acronis was called fltserv.sys (Located: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\fltsrv.sys). I ended up in an endless bluescreen loop, but also couldn't boot to Safe Mode because I had disabled the TIB mounter, which allows the program to control safemode boot (it does this I guess to be able to make a backup no matter what the status of your Windows Installation).

So I booted up my Windows Repair USB, and after about 2 hours of trying FIXMBR and SFC /scannow and other various things, I opened up Driver Verifier (do this by just typing verifier in the recovery CMD), just for kicks, to disable it. Since my recovery disk wouldn't let me access the Windows drive to just delete the .sys file, I figured I was out of luck at this point. I pressed the "Display information about the current verified drivers" button and hit next. I just decided to hit the "Add" button below the right pane, and what do you know, it pops open an explorer window which allows you to see .sys files. So I navigated to its path, deleted it, rebooted, and was able to login.

Afterward, I completely uninstalled Acronis True Image Home 2013 by using the Acronis Removal Tool (found here: http://dl.acronis.com/u/support/atih_cleanup_tool_s_e.exe Directions here: https://kb.acronis.com/content/34876).

Once that was done, I was having major CPU issues, so I uninstalled my ESET Smart Security, disabled Driver Verifier, and restarted. I installed Eset Smart Security 8, and everything seems to be good now. As far as I can tell, my memory is sitting pretty stable with Firefox and a few other programs open at about 2.7GB. I'll probably go over Poolmon again if I have issues.

Quite a journey. I'm not precisely sure if it was Acronis or ESET that was the culprit, but at least my issue is gone.

End Edit

@David

Here are the current running processes and the detailed ram usage from ProcessExplorer:

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