Explorer.exe stops respondings

[rak]

Hi all. Over the past few days my Windows Explorer has begun to give me
trouble. Stops responding several times a day. I've been through the
Reliability and Performance Monitor and the Event Viewer and cannot find any
specific correlation with installs or hw, sw changes. Most, but not all, of
the errors seem to be related to ntdll.dll and encoders.dll. I can search
for the specific error codes one by one, but since there are several, I
thought there might be an easy way to check or re-install Explorer.

32 bit OEM version of vista x86, Home Premium, SP2, fully patched
Explorer.exe version is 6.0.6002.18005
(have recent Acronis image and recovery disks from original run)

 

[rak]

Thanks for the tip. I checked DEP and it was already on. I'm checking out
my conexant hd audio driver updates. Not sure yet. My main problem occurs
when right clicking. I'll post back if I find anything. Other ideas
welcome.

 

[rak]

No love I'm afraid. Continues to be a problem. I can't swear to it, but it
seems only to happen right after startup. If I use Task Manager to stop the
process and then restart it, then all is well.

 

[rak]

Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be video related
either. Anything I right click on after startup kills explorer. If I stop
and restart explorer.exe anything I do seems to work.

 

[Guest]

After you finish that do this
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Disable shell extension one bt one/

 

[rak]

Thanks for sticking with this one. Can you provide the link again? Didn't
show up in your post.

 

[rak]

Thanks. Working on it. If it makes any difference, I'm narrowing it down
somewhat. In safe mode I have no problem. In safe mode with networking the
problem is still there. In fact, restarting explorer.exe. does not cause it
to go away.

 

[rak]

Got it. Your suggestion worked for me. Thanks so much for your help.
Turns out that a file deletion program named "Eraser" was the problem.
Guess I'm going to spend some time understanding more about how shexview
works. If I can return the favor, let me know.