As is the joy of being a PC user, you are on occasion going to encounter Gremlins. I’ve been doing this way too long and recently encountered a problem that I simply could not solve. When rendering some video in Blender recently, I started getting out of memory errors, then my computer would crash completely.
I spent many days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. After countless Google searches and the like I found absolutely no solutions and in the end, I decided to re-install completely. Then much to my chagrin, after installing and running all the various service packs, the problems came right back again.
In the end, it ended up being the Broadcom Wireless Tray application that was leaking memory. Worst part was, it never showed up in PERFMON, or Task Manager, which made debugging a nightmare. The memory was being leaked at such a low level, none of the monitoring tools tracked it… a proverbial needle in a haystack.
Then I happened upon this:
… that’s a lot of Page Faults, and thus my first indicator. Page Faults sadly aren’t shown in Task Manager by default and thus I overlooked this issue. In the end, removing BCMWLTRY.exe and presto, leak is gone.
Totally off topic, but this problem is why I haven’t updated more here. Hopefully just one person comes across this problem and I help them in some way, as when I googled, there was nothing.
Totally Off Topic