Explorer.exe is your entire windows interface, your start button, etc...nothin you can do about that one. If you end it, your entire desktop goes blank. 18k is rather low so I wouldn't be concerned about it. On my home computer when windows is loaded, all my programs i regularly use, I'm roughly in the 4gb range of ram usage just sitting idle. then again I have 32gb of ram in my system so it doesn't make a difference to me when I have everything cranked up like that.

dwm.exe is desktop window manager, that means, all the glass effects, window animations when you open/close etc...that will go up and down depending on how much stuff you have open at once. nothing can be done about that one either. well I shouldnt say nothing, 15k (translates to roughly 15mb of ram use)is pretty low for it to use on a given system, but if its eating huge amounts of resources (like 60k plus) you can turn off windows effects like glass or whatever(I don't know what version of windows you are using).


task manager will always spike like that on your cpu usage just because its reading itself opening. so to be clearer, the act of opening up task manager uses processor resources, and thats what you are seeing in that spike, when it goes down that means the computer is done opening task manager. if you open up task manager and then open another program you'll see it spike again and go back down the same way.