viewing thumbnails kills explorer

[looped]

In XP home, when I view thumbnails the explorer window instantly goes
away- instantly just vanishes. I cannot view any thumbnails. All
updates and services packs installed... any reports that SP2 could
cause this? It's a new issue that may have surfaced after that
update...

 

[George Hester]

No not really a result of SP2. More likely a result of B(rowser) H(elper)
O(bjects). Your shell (Explorer) is crashing.

 

[looped]

No not really a result of SP2. More likely a result of B(rowser) H(elper)
O(bjects). Your shell (Explorer) is crashing.

sounds correct - do you know of a fix?

 

[Don Taylor]

sounds correct - do you know of a fix?

It seems like this problem only began being reported by hundreds
and thousands of people after SP2 hit the streets. SP2 changed
something about this and it has never been admitted or documented.

There is a free little viewer shellexview that will list off many
of the things going on behind the scenes with Windows Explorer.
It will also let you disable these, one at a time, and you can
then see whether the problem goes away or not.

Don't be surprised to find 75 of these even if you have an almost
bare machine. If you have been adding little things to the system
it is possible to have hundreds of these things. Disabling them
one at a time is a slow task. You can turn off all of them at
once but that will make surprising parts of Windows Explorer stop
operating as you might expect it to.

It is possible that you can turn some or even all of these off and
the problem won't go away. I fought that for months. It is also
likely that problems like this give no clue about what the real
problem is or put any event in the event log, even when Windows
Explorer is repeatedly crashing, something which I believe is
intentional.

 

[looped]

It seems like this problem only began being reported by hundreds
and thousands of people after SP2 hit the streets. SP2 changed
something about this and it has never been admitted or documented.

There is a free little viewer shellexview that will list off many
of the things going on behind the scenes with Windows Explorer.
It will also let you disable these, one at a time, and you can
then see whether the problem goes away or not.

Don't be surprised to find 75 of these even if you have an almost
bare machine. If you have been adding little things to the system
it is possible to have hundreds of these things. Disabling them
one at a time is a slow task. You can turn off all of them at
once but that will make surprising parts of Windows Explorer stop
operating as you might expect it to.

It is possible that you can turn some or even all of these off and
the problem won't go away. I fought that for months. It is also
likely that problems like this give no clue about what the real
problem is or put any event in the event log, even when Windows
Explorer is repeatedly crashing, something which I believe is
intentional.

shellexview enabled me to fix the issue - thanks

 

[George Hester]

There is BHO Demon. Get version 1.0.0.3. Stay away from the installer
version just get the bare zip.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads/bhod/

If this doesn't find anything (remember it finds good ones too) we have to
look at something else. That would be does there seem to be anything that
you do which casues the shell to crash? There is an issue in IE (related to
Windows Explorer) where xml files can cause this. Maybe switch to View |
Details mode in Windows Explorer.

 

[looped]

There is BHO Demon. Get version 1.0.0.3. Stay away from the installer
version just get the bare zip.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads/bhod/

If this doesn't find anything (remember it finds good ones too) we have to
look at something else. That would be does there seem to be anything that
you do which casues the shell to crash? There is an issue in IE (related to
Windows Explorer) where xml files can cause this. Maybe switch to View |
Details mode in Windows Explorer.

I used shellexview to disable lots of stuff and the problem is fixed.