Is there a way to restart the Desktop Window Manager in Windows 8? Note that this is not Explorer, but DWM itself (restarting Explorer didn't do anything for me). Currently mine is using 4,352MB RAM and hovering in the 2% CPU range. I've tried doing net stop uxsms but apparently that service name doesn't exist for Windows 8. Whenever DWM gets like this, my system starts acting weird even though Task Manager says I have 11.2GB RAM free (20.6 in use).
Restarting my system usually takes care of the issue, but I hate having to do that every few weeks just because of this.
Use Taskmanager or ProcessExplorer and simply kill/terminate the DWM process. Winlogon.exe automatically restarts the DWM.exe process.
Here is a nice way to do it: open the command prompt with administrative rights.
windows key -> type 'cmd' -> right click 'command prompt' and choose 'run as administrator'
then type
taskkill /f /im dwm.exeI'm not sure how to give Josh the credit for this (from the comments above), but the answer ultimately came from: Why does Desktop Window Manager leak memory or even crash?. By disabling hardware acceleration on Chrome and restarting it, then letting things sit overnight DWM went from 4.4GB to ~446MB which is a dramatic difference. It looks like other things are still acting weird/slow (even after using magicandre1981's answer - specifically doing a search in the Start area takes 5+ seconds to accept characters) which doesn't feel right on a system with a Quad i7, 32GB DDR3 and 4GB video RAM, but maybe I'll still just have to stick with the occasional restart still. Whenever I do a reboot everything is blazing fast again.