Windows 7 RTM contains what appears to be a memory leak bug that occurs when the chkdsk /R command is initiated on a non-system volume. The result is the process taking up as memory as possible until the system is using over 90% of your total memory. The memory usage issue occurs when chkdsk /R is initiated in the command prompt and in the GUI, in which case it would be under the explorer.exe process. The memory usage issue can also be replicated in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Chkdsk Stage 4 of 5 at 82% completion. A total of 7.82GB out of 8GB of RAM was being used.

Some fans have been calling this a “showstopper” bug. Randall Kennedy from Infoworld even goes as far as to suggesting that this “bug” could derail the launch.

However, ZDNet’s Ed Bott claims this bug is nothing close to a showstopper. A few tries at replicating the issue on different test systems showed that Microsoft gives several warnings prompting the user to dismount the volume or perform the check at a scheduled time the next time you reboot before Windows starts up.

Steven Sinfosky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft, left a comment on Chris123NT regarding this issue. He says that this is indeed not a showstopper and occurs by design.

In this case, we haven’t reproduced the crash and we’re not seeing any crashes with chkdsk on teh stack reported in any measurable number that we could find. We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded — we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.

While we appreciate the drama of “critical bug” and then the pickup of “showstopper” that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level. Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.

Sinofsky also stated that they are doing overnight stress testing of 40 machines to see if the problem can be reproduced.

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. Read the rest at windows7center.com.