Paged pool memory leak in Windows 11
I have been dealing with this weird memory leak for some time. I currently have 32GB of RAM. Whenever I leave my computer turned on for hours, even without any programs, my RAM usage slowly but consistently grows, sometimes reaching 3 to 4GB, forcing me to restart my PC continously. I have noticed on my Task Manager that the paged pool does not shrink, but grows continuosly. I used to Poolmon to see what was going on and I saw this:
I have searched everywhere to understand what the "Key" pool tag actually means, since whenever I use the findstr command with cmd on the System32\drivers directory, it only gives me a long list of so many .sys files: https://pastebin.com/itNXcm5B (I have a Ryzen CPU and a honestly old Radeon GPU (RX 580), just in case)
Frankly, to my understanding, this issue with high paged pool usage means that there is some driver issue that causes a "kernel-mode" memory leak, and to identify such drivers, the pool tags on Poolmon are a way to find out which drivers do not release memory. However, on my case, I haven't found anything useful regarding the "Key" tag, because of the aforementioned long list of .sys files. I've reinstalled my GPU drivers just in case, even using Display Driver Uninstaller, and I concluded that the GPU was not the issue.
I suspect some malware might be involved, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm honestly a bit lost here, so any help will be appreciated 😊
Posted Feb 18, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC