WinXP with too many windows open, file explorer window is corrupted

Question

Here's something that has bothered me for awhile and I wondered if anyone had any ideas. This has been on multiple computers, but always at work and always on a dual monitor setup running Windows XP Professional. It's been multiple machines now that have done it, but both machines have had ample RAM and speed.

I'll be running with a lot of applications/windows open. For example, right now I have 20 items in my taskbar. Often I'll have multiple Outlook emails opened and multiple Windows Explorer (windows key + E) windows open, too. I have noticed a problem where at some point, after some amount of items being open(ed) and/or over a period of time, if I hit win+e to open a new explorer window it my system will start feeling unstable and slow, and the new explorer window that opens is graphically corrupted. Instead of the file/edit/view bar and the navigation bar, it will instead just have a blank gray bar with the Windows logo in the center (which is usually in the upper-right corner). Closing this new explorer and opening a new one won't fix it - usually it's only if I close out extra open windows to trim down how many things are open that I'm able to recover and open a new explorer window and have it work normal.

Is there a limit to the number of native explorer windows you can open in XP, or the number of windows/applications in general? Outlook and explorer.exe seem to be the worst offenders, closing out extra of those windows.

Answer 1

From here: http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2007/02/07/max-num-of-open-windows-under-xp-2003-vista-resolved.aspx (read the full article)

To tweak the limit, take a look in the registry at HLKM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/SubSystems

(cranked up a bit if you find yourself manipulating a lot of desktop objects.)

Within that key is a subkey called Windows, which contains in it, among other things, the value "SharedSection=1024,3072"

Changing the SharedSection entry to "1024,3072,512" (note the comma and the value)increases the size of the "hidden" desktop heap.

If that doesn't work, try increasing the second of the comma delimited values (e.g. 3072 -> 4096) which is the size limit of any particular desktop heap.

Update: just to clarify for some pepole... on vista your default is 1024,3072,512 changing is to 1024,4096,512 will make the difference