Shell Restart

[ralphs]

What might be wrong? Anyone have ideas that I use to try to fix this?

This happens a lot. For example it happened today at 7AM and again at
2:40PM.

I get a restart of the shell. It happens mostly when I click on the Start
button and then hover the mouse over Programs. There will be a delay and
then the restart.

Less frequently but a higher percentage of the time I do this, I get it when
opening Network Connections from the desktop by right clicking the icon and
selecting Open. It happens but only rarely if I open it by double clicking
on the Network Connections icon.

Sometimes (maybe every 3rd day) it doesn't successfully restart and I see a
desktop without taskbar or icons and cannot do anything other than shutdown.
Upon starting again it does not complain of an abnormal shutdown, just
starts normally.

The Event Viewer does not give much information. It says:

The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted.

Source: Winlogon


The machine:

Dell Latitude D505 Laptop, 1.5GHz Pentium-M
XP Pro SP2 patches are current, 512M
C: 60Gig internal
D: CD RW/DVD
E: 80Gig USB
USB optical mouse

Automatic updates are disabled (I do it manually)
All of these are current
AVG Anti Virus
Spybot
SpywareBlaster
Windows Defender
ZoneAlarm
Windows-supplied firewall is disabled

 

[smlunatick]

What might be wrong? Anyone have ideas that I use to try to fix this?

This happens a lot. For example it happened today at 7AM and again at
2:40PM.

I get a restart of the shell. It happens mostly when I click on the Start
button and then hover the mouse over Programs. There will be a delay and
then the restart.

Less frequently but a higher percentage of the time I do this, I get it when
opening Network Connections from the desktop by right clicking the icon and
selecting Open. It happens but only rarely if I open it by double clicking
on the Network Connections icon.

Sometimes (maybe every 3rd day) it doesn't successfully restart and I see a
desktop without taskbar or icons and cannot do anything other than shutdown.
Upon starting again it does not complain of an abnormal shutdown, just
starts normally.

The Event Viewer does not give much information. It says:

The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted.

Source: Winlogon

The machine:

Dell Latitude D505 Laptop, 1.5GHz Pentium-M
XP Pro SP2 patches are current, 512M
C: 60Gig internal
D: CD RW/DVD
E: 80Gig USB
USB optical mouse

Automatic updates are disabled (I do it manually)
All of these are current
AVG Anti Virus
Spybot
SpywareBlaster
Windows Defender
ZoneAlarm
Windows-supplied firewall is disabled

I've previously had this problem. Turned out to be some type of auto-
start application which added a "desktop" tool (mime was Google
Desktop Search.) When I removed it, the problem has been fixed.

Look at which applications auto-start and what addition "tools" are
configured into your XP.

 

[ralphs]

I've previously had this problem. Turned out to be some type of auto-

start application which added a "desktop" tool (mime was Google
Desktop Search.) When I removed it, the problem has been fixed.

Look at which applications auto-start and what addition "tools" are
configured into your XP.

I will check for those tools being installed. Thank you.

 

[gmanjoe]

Windows has a recovery feature built into it . When ever your windows gets a critical error, the recovery feture tells it what to do. Yours is obviously set to "Restart Automatically" If you tell it to do nothing you will then see what your error really is.

Right click the My Computer icon, click properties, click the advanced tab, click the settings button under startup and recovery, uncheck the box thats says "Automatically restart", click ok.

The next time the error occurs, you will see what is actually going on. Probably a blue screen, in which case you will want to write down the error message.