I noticed this the other day. The Dock closes and reverts back to the Windows Taskbar after the screen goes to sleep and the lock screen becomes available. When I come back to my PC and wiggle the mouse the lock screen appears. I press [Enter] to get the login prompt then enter my credentials. The PC comes back to where it was when I left off but the Winstep menus don't show, only the Window Taskbar appears. It's set to "Lock the taskbar" and "Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode". Everything else is off. The taskbar is located at the bottom and it's set to "Always, hide labels".

Nexus-Ultimate.exe - 26.06.1256
WSUpdate.exe - 26.05.0223
Winstep.exe - 26.01.0135
WsxService.exe - 26.02.0144
WsxMMTimer.dll - 1.01.0015

This only started happening in the last few days. I'm running on a Thinkpad X1 (10) with Windows 10 Pro v10.0.19045 Build 19045. I never update Windows but I have Bitdefender and use ExpressVPN. I've rebooted my machine several times and have turned off the VPN. Still no luck.

Any ideas?

Not sure I understood what is actually happening?

After resume, is nexus.exe still running in Task Manager?

Also, if it started happening recently and the software did not change, what other recent changes did you make in your system?

It is not running in Task Manager. It's as though it just closes while the PC's lock screen comes on; I notice when I log back on through the lock screen. I never upgrade Windows so that can't be it. It looks like the Nexus-Ultimate.exe is dated 21 Sep 2026 (not sure why) and Winstep.exe is dated 03 Feb 2026. The last Nexus.wsxkey is dated 31 Oct 2025. I don't remember this starting before about a month or two ago. It's installed in "D:\Utilities\Winstep".

I don't really do much updating to my PC but various pieces of software are always wanting to update. I mostly limit updates to Firefox, Vivaldi, and Thunderbird. Bitdefender, I think, is always updating itself however. I installed EaseUS "TodoBackup" back on 12 Jul 2026. I updated Visual Studio on the 19th of Sept but these issues was happening before that. I also updated a product called Snagit (Screen-capture software from Techsmith) on 22 Jul 2026. I don't believe anything else was updated.

HTH,

Bill,

Had you replied to my questions when you originally posted about this over 10 days ago, then, if this does turn out to be an issue with the application, there is a good chance it could have been investigated and fixed in time for the v26.9 release.

Since this was not happening before and then suddenly started, I suspect either a configuration change in Nexus or something external interfering with it - a new buggy version of BitDefender, for instance.

Anyway, the high memory warning is definitely not normal. Nexus should typically use only a few tens of MB of RAM, so if it has exceeded 1 GB, something is causing its memory usage to grow far beyond what it should.

This may or may not be related to Nexus disappearing while the computer is asleep/locked, but since both problems are happening on the same system I would like to investigate them together.

Please leave the "Do not show this message again" option unchecked.

If the warning appears again, please make a note of roughly how long Nexus had been running and whether the computer had gone through one or more sleep/wake cycles before the warning appeared.

Also, if Nexus disappears again after sleep, please check Event Viewer -> Windows Logs -> Application immediately afterwards and look for any error mentioning Nexus.exe, Application Error, or Windows Error Reporting. If there is one, please copy/paste the details to me.

Before putting the computer to sleep, please also open Task Manager and check the memory usage of Nexus.exe. If Nexus is still running after the computer wakes up, check it again and let me know whether the memory usage increased substantially.

Finally, I would also like you to check two diagnostic values Nexus stores in the Windows Registry after this happens: MaxRAMUsage and MaxPageFileUsage. Those values record the highest memory usage Nexus has seen and will help me determine whether this is primarily Working Set growth, committed/pagefile memory growth, or both.

The values are located at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinSTEP2000\WorkSHELF

The fact that Nexus has now both exceeded 1 GB of memory and has apparently been terminating while the system is asleep gives us something much more concrete to work with.

I've printed your comments so I can review this when/if it happens again. I was looking at the Event Logs and noticed some log entries for source "Perflib" stating...

"Access to performance data was denied to user "SYSTEM" (value from GetUserName() for the running thread) as attempted from module "D:\Utilities\Winstep\WsxService.exe" (value from GetModuleFileName() for the binary that issued the query)."

They're like one or two a month. There wasn't any log entry with nexus.exe in it. So, I hope I can help track down what's going on (sounds like a Marvin Gaye soung)

By the way, in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\WinSTEP2000" there is only Nexus>Docks and Nexus>Tabs folders and Shared>IPCache and Shared>JumplistCache folders.

You're running Nexus Ultimate not Winstep Xtreme, my bad. The values are located inside

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinSTEP2000\Nexus

Ah. The MaxPageFileUsage is 1316982784 and the MaxRAMUsage is 1074003968.

Ok, can you try monitoring Nexus memory usage over time via the Details tab of the Windows Task Manager?

Also, how many times did you get the red warning dialog? And normally how long has Nexus been running until it appears?

I only got the red warning once. I did have Nexus Ultimate shut down, maybe, nine or ten times before I got the warning. Since I submitted the initial forum entry it has only happened once (the shutdown not the red warning - I think). I haven't had any problem since we've been discussing this. Right now memory usage for nexus-ultimate.exe is at a little over 19,240K (via Task Manager).

I loaded Sysinternals' Process Explorer. Nexus-Ultimate.exe uses from 0.14-0.21 CPU, 45,272K Private Bytes, 46,120 Working Set, 5 Memory Priority, and 45K nonpaged Pool.