explorer.exe closes and restarts (a circulus viciosus)

[TheSurgeon]

Hi, I have installed three updates (which???) after SP2 and after reboot,
explorer opnes and closes fater 2-3 seconds continuously. I can't get System
Restore working. In safe mode, the same thing happens.
What can I do instead of watching an ever oscillating explorer screen or
reinstalling windows? Is there a way to activate system restore from DOS?
Thank you.

Sumer Yamaner

 

[Guest]

Hi, I have installed three updates (which???) after SP2 and after reboot,
explorer opnes and closes fater 2-3 seconds continuously. I can't get System
Restore working. In safe mode, the same thing happens.
What can I do instead of watching an ever oscillating explorer screen or
reinstalling windows? Is there a way to activate system restore from DOS?
Thank you.

Sumer Yamaner

 

[Guest]

Sorry last post empty. We have several customers experiencing same or
similar issue. Affecting SP2 machines. Most if not all have Symantec AV and
are Athlon XP machines. Explorer crashes/restarts contstantly (about every
10 seconds). Trying to use any feature of windows crashes immediately. Also
in safe mode. Any ideas so far? I've tried regclean 4.1 as suggested by
others with explorer crashing, but no luck.

 

[TheSurgeon]

There are only two ways.
You must reinstall XP or find a way to activate system restore.
I think I will try the first because there is no way to run rstrui.exe
succesfully.

 

[Dana Brash]

Before you reinstall, we just fixed this on someone else's system. Turned
out the culprit was the patch kb834707.

See the posts titled: "explorer starts and stops over and over at startup"
dated 10/17/2004

HTH,
=d=

 

[TheSurgeon]

I have already started the new installation but there is an important point.
The patch kb834707 shouldn't be applied to SP2-RC versions. In SP2 final,
this patch doesn't cause any problems.

 

[Jim Hernandez]

I have a machine (Win XP Pro SC 2) with this same issue. At least I believe
it is the same issue. This system keeps starting and stopping explorer.exe
over and over in regular and safe mode as well. All attempts, so far, to
stop this have failed. Just incase this machine's details are any different,
here they are.

1. The machine seems to boot normally to the login screen.
2. Login seems to start normally.
3. Explorer.exe starts and startup programs begin loading.
4. Explorer.exe quits, dies or somehow stops as if I had terminated it's
process. This occurs before the startup programs have completely loaded. No
error message is given.
5. Explorer.exe tries to start again. In about 3-5 seconds, it repeats 4.

So far I have (not in any particular order):
1. Run several registry cleaners (Norton Windoctor, System mechanic).
2. Played around with
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVerson\policies\Explorer key
UseDesktopIniCache (using value 0 or 1 or no key at all)
3. Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D (various seemingly nonrelated fixes)
4. AVG and Norton Antivirus (nothing found)
5. CHKDSK /R (recovery console, booted from cd)
6. Prayer. The Universe laughed at me.
7. Waving a dead chicken over the possessed machine.
8. Disk defrag (sometimes this can fix some weird problems, not recommended
though. At least I wouldn't suggest this as a fixer.)
9. sfc /scannow
10. Uninstall various patches.

Has anyone figured this out yet? I have seen this problem in several places
but I have seen no posted solution.

Regards. If there is any suggestions, please post it here.

Thanks.

 

[Dana Brash]

Hello Jim,

We solved this for another user (See the posts titled: "explorer starts and
stops over and over at startup"
dated 10/17/2004)

Here is the solution from that thread:

1. Boot into Safe Mode
2. Open Task manager by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC
3. In Task Manager select File > New Task (Run...)
4. type "cmd" (no quotes) and hit enter to open a command prompt
5. navigate to your %windir% directory (probably c:\windows\)
6. Use this command from the %windir% directory: dir spuninst.exe /s
7. Look for this entry:

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB834707$\spuninst

09/20/2004 04:50 AM 169,984 spuninst.exe
1 File(s) 169,984 bytes

8. Navigate to the correct folder by entering:
C:\>cd C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB834707$\spuninst

9. You will be prompted with:
C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB834707$\spuninst>

10. type "spuninst" (without the quotes) so that it will now look like:
C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB834707$\spuninst>spuninst

11. Click 'next' at the dialog box to confirm uninstalling the patch.

12. reboot


I do NOT recommend continuing to run without this patch. There is (most
likely) a problem somewhere else, and I think the best next step is to
figure out how to make this patch work for you.

I'd start with a thorough virus scan, general system maintenance (kill temp
internet files, cookies, that annoying bit of software you've been meaning
to get rid of for the past few weeks but haven't gotten to, etc), defrag
(twice ~~ not a fix, but definitly beneficial), make sure Office is updated,
make sure anti-virus is updated, etc. etc.... It seems some people had
other problems with this patch that were related to running Zone Alarm and
the Windows based firewall at the same time. I don't know what your
situation is...

After a good bit of housecleaning, I'd apply the cumulative patch again.
Now that you know how to kill it, it's not a problem if it breaks again. If
it works then great, if it does break again, then try each included update
individually. This process would be a wonderful contribution to the
community so that we could (hopefully) nail down EXACTLY which fix is
breaking your systems. Those updates can be found from the links in this
article: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=834707

Please let me know if these steps allow you to regain controll of your
system.
If they do not, then perhaps your dead chicken dripped some blood into the
circuitry and you will need to do some more praying. I hear melted candle
wax does wonders for transistors and silicon...
;-)

--
HTH,
=d=


Dana Brash
MCSE, MCDBA, MCSA

(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

Thought I'd chime in here. I've had a similar problem on a couple machines
here in our organization. In our case, after the KB834707 update installs on
an SP2 machine the system does a hard reset (black screen then cold boot)
when the user logs on. The odd thing is, we can log on as a different user
and the system starts fine. Then when we backout the update using system
restore the problem goes away, at least until the next time the update loads.

I'm going to try the reinstall prep that Dana suggests and report back.
Since, in our case, it seems to be specific to a particular profile, I'm
starting to suspect an issue related to files in the Temporary Internet
Files. Thanks for all the input.

 

[Guest]

I have some followup information on this issue. I was able to resolve this
for one of my users by simply deleting their local user profile and
recreating it. Since I was able to login as another user (the local or domain
admin in my case) I opened the user profiles dialog under Advanced System
Properties, backed up the user's profile to a location on disk, and deleted
their profile.

I then logged the user in and the profile was recreated and they logged in
without incident. I then copied their Favorites, MyDocuments folder and other
user items from the backup. For those of you that are able to log in under
different user accounts, I recommend trying this solution.