Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) memory leakage in Windows 10 (Version 2004).

Latest 21h2 build, with latest changelogs pretending "We fixed a memory leak that could result in DWM unexpectedly using a lot of memory over time."

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/05/14/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-21382/

And THIS is the result:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsinsiders/comments/nelydj/build_21382_dwm_memory_leak_worse_than_ever/

Enough is enough!

I always thought that my laptop has problems with standby because of cryptolocked disk drive :D  Because of that, I have disabled all standby features, and just use hibernation or shutdown..

Hello Vladimir!

For me helps that trick for almost whole laptop working day to prevent more than 50 mb after that procedure

1. Run Command Prompt as Administrator,

and paste that lines

@ECHO OFF
taskkill /F /IM dwm.exe
taskkill /F /IM conhost.exe

Your screen will be black for second - and right now hit Enter (to close command prompt)

2. Ctrl+Alt+Esc - to open task manager - find line Administrator: Command Promt - and kill by Del button. Easy to find that line - because it almost in the end of tasks - and it with more Power Usage (with Orange color).

--- It works for me almost for 6 monts... while dear developers solve that bug....

can you share this script for restarting dwm.exe ?

There is no magic behind that.... it is just like opening task manager right click on dwm.exe and "kill process". So that is not really a workaround at all. You can kinda just let it leak to 1GB or something, and then kill the process or just restart windows. That is NOT a workaround at all.

@jeriksson82 no, what you described is just the normal madness of Windows 10. windows 10 will try with all might and power to work against you, replacing older drivers. It is possible, but you have to use some "tricks" in fulfilling it.

first you need to disable auto driver updates with gpedit, you need Windows 10 pro for that, and then also use this reg file:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/48277-enable-disable-driver-updates-windows-update-windows-10-a.html You need to use both methods, and then even it is not working at all 100%. You need to also deactivate your LAN/WIFI while youre doing so. And kinda be a bit "lucky" of the timings.

You need to remove the old drivers with DDU: https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html (important)

But reverting back to <= 27.20.100.8476 is not really an option. It will prevent dwm.exe memory leak, but I found out why. Because it will break modern standby. I found out by pure luck about this, that my modern standby and C10 states were broken again. And I debugged it back to that it was causing by the Intel driver 27.20.100.8476

So THAT is the reason, why the memory leak is gone with <= 27.20.100.8476, because it will break standby.

Others had also said that disabling the dGPU would prevent the memory to happen, if your laptop has a dGPU. But this also will just break modern standby. So that is the root cause of this.

This brings back the old theory and perfectly sums up, that the leak is triggered by using standby and also hibernate (also fast startup).

can you share this script for restarting dwm.exe ?