Another "Explorer Crashes & Restarts" issue

[MAG]

Hi folks-

I did a google on this, but haven't yet found a solution.

I'm running WindowsXP with all updates as of this posting, on an IBM T30
that is up to date with respect to its BIOS and drivers.

No major system changes recently, although in the past month I've gone
from Spybot 1.2 to 1.3, and added a software firewall (Sygate) required
by my company.

For about a week, not tightly coupled with any software changes to the
best of my observation, the Windows Explorer GUI crashes periodically,
usually when opening or closing a folder. The taskbar and toolbars go
away, then quickly get rebuilt. Sometimes some tray items are missing,
but otherwise it's fairly harmless. But annoying, since it's new and I
can't explain it.

McAfee (running latest engine/definition) scans come back clean. Spybot
and Ad-Aware (both up to date) are run routinely to clean out the 'bots.
System is otherwise running well.

There are no specific "problem folders" and the problem is not directly
reproducible. I can't make it happen on demand. It just happens every
hour or two, seemingly at random.

Any thoughts as to what might be causing this?

Marc

 

[Mark]

For about a week, not tightly coupled with any software changes to the
best of my observation, the Windows Explorer GUI crashes periodically,
usually when opening or closing a folder.

I'm not sure if it's the same problem, but I find I generally have to
kill and restart Explorer two to three times a day. I don't know what
the exact cause may be, but it normally locks up when I have at least
one window open on a directory with a lot of image files or a lot of
video files, with thumbnail view enabled: the odd thing is, it's
usually using 0% of the CPU time, so it's not even doing anything,
just sitting there.

Often I can disable thumbnail view on the directory, but XP, in its
'user friendly' way, just loves to re-enable thumbnails even though I
previously disabled them: rather a pain when I use the machine for
video editing and often have directories containing hundreds of video
clips or thousands of images.

Again, virus-checked, spybot-checked, otherwise working perfectly,
blah, blah... thumbnail view just seems to be significantly broken
when there are that many files in one place.

Mark

 

[MAG]

I'm not sure if it's the same problem, but I find I generally have to
kill and restart Explorer two to three times a day. I don't know what
the exact cause may be, but it normally locks up when I have at least
one window open on a directory with a lot of image files or a lot of
video files, with thumbnail view enabled: the odd thing is, it's
usually using 0% of the CPU time, so it's not even doing anything,
just sitting there.

Often I can disable thumbnail view on the directory, but XP, in its
'user friendly' way, just loves to re-enable thumbnails even though I
previously disabled them: rather a pain when I use the machine for
video editing and often have directories containing hundreds of video
clips or thousands of images.

Again, virus-checked, spybot-checked, otherwise working perfectly,
blah, blah... thumbnail view just seems to be significantly broken
when there are that many files in one place.

Mark

Mark-

Thanks for the follow-up. I'll look to see if this might be related,
but probably not. The folders I access most often, and have experienced
the Explorer crashes with, don't have many pictures etc. to be
previewed. This is a pretty wierd thing!

Marc