Original Post
Lately, if I leave my computer on for more than a day, my computer will start slowing down considerably. I will also get weird errors, such as if I update Steam, it'll give me a weird error during a Steam update such as "Steam.exe was deleted but file is still there". This "weird stuff" starts happening usually if I leave my computer on for more than a day. Everything works fine from boot up to one day of uptime, on average. Now, I finally found the culprit for this problem. I downloaded a copy of Sysinternals Process Explorer and did a search for Steam.exe (curious if another process was hogging handles to Steam.exe). I found hundreds (maybe thousands) of handles to Steam.exe belonging to the System Process (which has a PID of 4). Looking down the list I saw other .exe's and .dll's as well. This caused considerable slowdown as well because after leaving my computer on, the System Process would leak handles, making the system-wide handle count upwards to 20,000+. The problem is that I cannot find the source of the problem that causes the System Process to leak handles like it does. What's weird is for about the first day my computer is up, the System Process will not leak at all and everything works normally. After about a day of uptime, the System Process will randomly decide to start accumulating handles to random .exe and .dll files slowly. There is always several handles open to the same files. After about another three hours, my computer will become very slow. Usually, the System Process doesn't have handles open to any file on the computer. I managed to write a simple C++ program that controls the handle.exe program provided by Sysinternals to find and close all .exe and .dll handles in the System Process every 10 minutes. This isn't an effective solution but at least I can use my computer. I still cannot do stuff like update Steam.exe without it complaining that files are in use, unless I restart the C++ program I made to close all of the open handles really quickly. As you can see, this is very annoying. I do not have any spyware of any kind; as I am very careful of these things. I also ran spyware scans and they came up empty. I even ran Rootkit Revealer by Sysinternals and it came up empty. Has anyone else had any problem like this, and can anyone offer a solution? (besides restarting the computer of course - I need my computer on all the time because of server-related tasks). Why would Windows decide to start doing this randomly for no reason at all? I really hate the idea of reformatting because something really stupid like this started happening.
