Aleksey_

I finally nuked ESET by uninstalling and then running that utility in Safe Mode twice.... second time it said it had nothing to remove, but both times it hung in the end for several minutes and then complained about a driver in oem35.inf that it could not remove. I reinstalled ESET 14.x from scratch and imported my settings. Now ekrn.exe is hovering around 100mb (Private Working Set).

That says Memory (Private Working Set). That's all you got after all this time? No status update?

1) Are you running version 13 or 14? 2) I already cleaned the system using that ESET tool before installing version 13 and it was working fine. Being forced to go through this when the antivirus decides to autoupdate at a whim, is absolutely unacceptable.

On my machine which hasn't been rebooted in a while, version 13 ekrn.exe still takes only 50megs.

Now it's 257 megs right after the system started. Is this The New Normal for ESET?

I sent you the information.

This started since version 14 update on my Windows 7 x64 system. Why is your program now a memory hog?