Explorer crashing with some regularity

[David Hearn]

I have a new laptop which came with Vista Business - it arrived last
week. I immediately wiped the install and installed Vista Business from
scratch using latest drivers for everything. Windows Update is
completely up to date.

I'm finding that Explorer crashes quite often (3 times today, 2 times
yesterday). Specifically I've counted 13 crashes of Explorer since 19th
July.

The majority of these crashes have the message:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Explorer.EXE
Application Version: 6.0.6000.16386
Application Timestamp: 4549b091
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.0.6000.16386
Fault Module Timestamp: 4549bdc9
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00042e7b
OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.6
Locale ID: 2057
Additional Information 1: 8d13
Additional Information 2: cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311
Additional Information 3: 8d13
Additional Information 4: cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311

Any suggestions?

Thanks

David

 

[MICHAEL]

* David Hearn:

I have a new laptop which came with Vista Business - it arrived last
week. I immediately wiped the install and installed Vista Business from
scratch using latest drivers for everything. Windows Update is
completely up to date.

I'm finding that Explorer crashes quite often (3 times today, 2 times
yesterday). Specifically I've counted 13 crashes of Explorer since 19th
July.
Any suggestions?

David,

A little more info about your machine would be helpful.

Also- what are some of the programs you have installed?
Any recent installs? Like an Anti-virus program or
CD/DVD burning program?


-Michael

 

[Kerry Brown]

Start Menu => All Programs => Accessories => System Tools => Internet
Explorer (No Addons)

Try running this for a while and see if it crashes. If it doesn't then an
addon that is installed is causing the problem. You have to try disabling
them one at a time until you find the one causing the problem. If you
upgraded from XP and had some IE addons installed then this is very common.
You should uninstall then reinstall all the addons in this case.

 

[David Hearn]

Start Menu => All Programs => Accessories => System Tools => Internet
Explorer (No Addons)

Try running this for a while and see if it crashes. If it doesn't then
an addon that is installed is causing the problem. You have to try
disabling them one at a time until you find the one causing the problem.
If you upgraded from XP and had some IE addons installed then this is
very common. You should uninstall then reinstall all the addons in this
case.

It's a completely clean install of the OS. It's Explorer itself which
is crashing, rather then IE, although I'm aware that they're linked
under the hood. I use Firefox and it's not happening at identical times
- sometimes opening files in VS2005, other times just using another app.

Literally it just happened again after unlocking the machine from being
locked (Win+L). After unlocking the Explorer has stopped responding
message appeared.

I'll give your suggestion a go though and see what happens.

Thanks

David

 

[David Hearn]

* David Hearn:

David,

A little more info about your machine would be helpful.

Also- what are some of the programs you have installed?
Any recent installs? Like an Anti-virus program or
CD/DVD burning program?


-Michael

HP nx7400, 2GB dual core machine, 2GB RAM, 120GB disk. Clean install of
Vista Business last week (came with the same OS). Lots of installs
performed over the first day - I'll have to work out the full list of
apps, but it's a lot - but no recollection of it starting after
installing a particular bit of software.

At the time of the last crash (a few minutes ago) I was running in the
foreground:

OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird 2.0.0.5, Visual Studio 2005 inc
SP1 + SP1 Update for Vista, TextPad 5.0.3, VMWare Player 2.0 (Build 45731).

Taskbar includes:
Trillian 3.1 Pro (no accounts set up yet)
Second Copy 7.0.1.11
DigiGuide 8.3
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition (10.2.0.276)

No CD/DVD apps installed.

Thanks

David

 

[Kerry Brown]

It's a completely clean install of the OS. It's Explorer itself which is
crashing, rather then IE, although I'm aware that they're linked under the
hood. I use Firefox and it's not happening at identical times - sometimes
opening files in VS2005, other times just using another app.

Literally it just happened again after unlocking the machine from being
locked (Win+L). After unlocking the Explorer has stopped responding
message appeared.

I'll give your suggestion a go though and see what happens.

If that doesn't pan out have you tried restoring the factory setup and
seeing if the crashes still occur? It could be a driver. I'd also test the
RAM as that error can some times be a symptom of bad RAM.

 

[dean-dean]

Windows Explorer crashes can be largely attributed to non-OS 3rd Party shell
extensions. Sometimes the extensions are obvious, sometimes not. An
obvious extension is a when a program adds an item to the right-click
context menu (which list varies depending on what you are right-clicking).
Some of these 3rd Party extensions work fine, some do not. An example of a
not so obvious shell extension is when a program adds thumbnail preview
capabilities to certain file types, putting it on a collision course with
Explorer's thumbnails creation. (You can test that one out by turning off
Explorer's thumbnails in Folder Options, and see if the crashes continue.).
Too, 3rd Party control panel items can also cause problems.

 

[David Hearn]

Additional right click options I have are added by:

OneNote
Beyond Compare
Tortoise SVN
Winzip 9
Scan for Viruses (Symantec Antivirus Corporate 10.2)

Thanks for the advice, I'll look at trying to find whether any of these
causes a problem.

David

 

[dean-dean]

Sometimes a program will give you the option as to whether or not it adds an
item to the context menu in the program's Tools/Options/Preferences). I'd
head in that direction first, to troubleshoot.