Memory Leak in Windows 8 Network Data Usage Monitoring Driver

Just thought I'd share this experience I had over the weekend, as it may save someone else many hours of troubleshooting.

I've been tinkering around with Windows 8 at home, even though I know there's little likelihood that we'll implement it at work any time soon.

While using my Windows 8 machine to copy a large amount of files from my NAS to a USB drive, I was experiencing lock-ups of my system. It wasn't a complete crash. The system would just become extremely unresponsive.

It soon became apparent that something was leaking memory. I was seeing the amount of memory being consumed skyrocket up to 100%, at which point the copy process would crash and system would stop responding politely. The task manager and performance monitor were not attributing the memory to any process however.

I tried using robocopy instead of Explorer copy. Same thing.

I tried updating the Realtek network driver, USB 3 driver and even the ASUS BIOS, (as they were all a few versions behind). Same thing.

I was getting to the point where I was figuratively scratching my head, so I tried booting into safe mode with networking. Aha! The memory usage stayed consistent and the copy performed just fine!

There are a number of network related drivers that safe mode don't load. DriverView showed that one of them is the Windows Network Data Usage Monitoring Driver ndu.sys that was introduced in Windows 8 and provides "network data usage monitoring functionality".

Disabling this driver by changing the start value to 4 in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ndu 
solved the problem.

Maybe this will be fixed when Microsoft releases Blue.