Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer Keeps restarting

#1 Layback Bear

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Posted 13 February 2010 - 01:41 PM

Window 7 Home Premium. When I try to open a program like notepad using right click Windows Explorer has to restart and it does. Why?

#2 Romeo29

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Posted 13 February 2010 - 02:08 PM

This behavior may be caused by some buggy shell extensions. Have you recently installed any software which installed some items in Windows right-click context menu?

A good starting point is to look in your Event Viewer and see recent Explorer.exe related events.

This post has been edited by Romeo29: 13 February 2010 - 02:14 PM

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#3 Layback Bear

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Posted 13 February 2010 - 05:10 PM

Description
Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version: 6.1.7600.16450, time stamp: 0x4aebab8d
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be02b
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000c6cd2
Faulting process id: 0x670
Faulting application start time: 0x01caa272d06d9ca8
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 90c9ab20-0e7a-11df-9c8d-001320eca465
This is what I found several times. It means nothing to me but maybe some one here.

#4 RknRusty

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Posted 13 February 2010 - 07:25 PM

A lot of people have Explorer crashing, but it's for many reasons that are hard to pin down. If it happens when right clicking, there is a good way to try and find it. The context menus when you right click are shell extensions that are populated with right click options for your applications. One or more of your 3rd party programs may be killing it when you right click.

Download ShellExview http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html. Open Shellexview and disable all non Microsoft extensions and see if you can still crash Explorer. If not, turn them on one at a time till you can find which one is the culprit. You may or may not find one, but it's the best place to start.

#5 keyboardNinja

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Posted 13 February 2010 - 11:11 PM

You won't find all the right-click menus in ShellExView (at least I couldn't find all mine anyway). I have to go into the registry to kill those pesky context menus. :huh:

NOTE: ALWAYS BACK UP THE REGISTRY BEFORE YOU MAKE MODIFICATIONS!!!

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers

Look in each of these keys and identify the context menus you don't want. Anti-virus software will usually show up here, along with backup software. I try to keep my right-click menus clean, and usually delete the offending key(s). Don't simply delete all of them under "ContextMenuHandlers", though. Only the ones that you know you don't want anymore (don't forget to backup the registry first!!). They will normally have the product's name as the name of the key.

This post has been edited by keyboardNinja: 13 February 2010 - 11:12 PM

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#6 Layback Bear

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Posted 14 February 2010 - 09:50 AM

Thanks for all your replies. I don't do registry things. I'm not qualified. I ran chkdsk /f and it seemed to take care of the problem so far. I was right clicking on Word Pad and now it works properly.