I've been having an issue with explorer.exe on my computer for awhile now where opening files, viewing pictures/music/video files causes it to load a little longer than normal, in particular with the thumbnails and the memory usage goes up and never goes down; at most I've seen it go up to 40,000.

I've used ShellExView to disable certain shell extensions, which only solved one issue (explorer not responding and restarting a lot), but the memory usage of explorer.exe still goes up and the occasional dllhost.exe or two pops up and never leaves (at most only 2 show up and they never use much memory).

I've checked for viruses/rootkits/etc. extensively with malwarebytes and the like, and there are no signs of any of those on my computer. dllhost and explorer aren't fakes or anything, but the usage goes up and rarely goes down the more I view my files (the memory usage does go down after awhile, but it's not by much).

I've tried to rebuild and fix the windows media player library, which actually fixes the issue for awhile but it comes back again like it never happened.

I'm thinking its something to do with thumbnails and video files, so I tried this hotfix, but it didn't really help: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/is-there-a-hot-fix-to-correct-corrupted-media/ffe1e4a2-6d35-4a5a-83b6-b2b42e39ef63

I'm thinking it might be a dllhost memory leak, but I'm not sure if this solution would fix it: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/windows-7-dllhostexe-memory-leak/7147cdab-a29b-4277-9a33-04199095ca01

What do I do? I'm on Windows 7 btw.