If you are using an NVIDIA graphics card, you could be affected by a memory leak from a component of the NVIDIA Control Panel that is installed with every NVIDIA graphics driver. The component is NVIDIA Settings (nvtray.exe), which loads and controls the tray icon for the NVIDIA Control Panel utility. Please note that it doesn't affect every user, but if you are affected, there doesn't seem to be an upper limit of how much memory is leaked. People have reported it taking up as much as 2 GB of memory! We have personally seen it take up anywhere from 300 MB to over 500 MB of memory, but that is still an astounding amount of memory for a utility that uses as little as 2.3 MB of memory. In this article, we will show you how to check if nvtray.exe is leaking memory, and how to disable it if it leaks memory. Even if it just leaks a few hundred MB of memory, that is still wasted memory that could be put to better use by other software or the operating system's disk cache. Link : ED#152 : NVIDIA Control Panel Memory Leak Problem
