Startcraft II is nuking Explorer

Hello gentlemen. I bought the digital release of SC2, 2 days ago, and I'm currently enjoying the h3ll out of it. Now my problem is that every single time I quit the game, it apparently takes explorer.exe with it. Windows interface becomes frozen and when I ctrl-esc the task manager shows explorer as taking 40-50% CPU usage which forces me to kill the process and restart explorer... Has anyone experienced this? How do I fix that?

 

So this only happens to SC2?
How about other games?
Does this also happen if you don't play games or do heavy computing?
How long does the high CPU usage last? Does it go away by itself?

I also have the digital download version, but mine's fine, so you can rule that out. Anyways, do a virus/spyware/adware scan, try defrag your harddrive, reduce visual effects, etc...
Also try this: pop-in the Windows installation DVD and do a repair, see if that helps.

 

Oh, almost forgot about this little program I used to use:

Process Explorer

It's Process Explorer, you should be able to pinpoint exactly which process is taking up the CPU under explorer.exe when the CPU usage is high.

 

Yes it's only with Starcraft. I'll try to the Process Explorer thingy.

 

Haven't encounted a problem like this but maybe is because you haven't hardware requirements and your computer can't manage the game and windows. What SO are you using?

 

Sometimes my IE takes a dive after SC2 exit, but thats mostly if I try to do stuff right away instead of waiting for a minute.

But its not the only game that does it, other games and scenarios can cause it to happen and I think its due to my triple monitor eyefinity setup.

On my laptop I have not noticed any issues with SC2 causing a hang/crash.

 

Just click on my profile and you will see that if something is causing a problem, it is definitely not my hardware. I can alt-tab fine between my browser and the game or between the zune player and the game. It's just that SC does something to explorer when exiting and that's what i want to fix...

 

when your cpu usage is runnign high ctrl+alt+delete to bring up the taskbar and move over to the applications tab and click on cpu to see what app it is and you can close that particilar app down if you need to and restore you cpu usage to nominal levels

 

Ok just finished a 3 hours play session and explorer is currently frozen. I did a test before that and launched the game for 15 minutes and explorer was fine when I exited the game. This is really puzzling. I've attached a screenshot from Process Explorer. I'll restart explorer.exe after posting this; the desktop and taskbar are completely frozen.

 

Try sorting the column by "Process", that way it will show which programs/processes are under "explorer.exe"

Judging from the screenshot, you have got lots background programs open, have you tried running SC2 from a "clean" Windows boot (ie. not launching any programs)?