Comment by vel0city

You don't have any idea of what it actually is or what its actually doing but you're 100% certain its overly large, complex, and wasteful.

Incredible.

And as mentioned, on my other Win11 machines I couldn't get explorer.exe to use more than ~200MB, with most of its usage around 110-130MB. I think you've got something else going on there, potentially lots of other 3rd party applications hooked into it causing excessive memory usage. Win11 doesn't inherently use 500MB of memory compared to Win10 only using a bit under 200MB. That's something with your machines.