Faulting explorer.exe

Hello all from a new member!

I am having trouble with Windows Explorer incessantly crashing, reloading my desktop and giving me the "Windows has encountered an error...needs to close...we are sorry (yeah, right!) for the inconvenience" error message. Occasionally this is followed by the Dr. Watson error message, but not usually. It is not happening all of the time, but has recently gotten more frequent. It is happening every time I open, then close My Computer. The error signature is 6.0.2900.3156. Faulting module is unknown. The Event # is 1000. Fault address is 0x01691509 (I think this may be different sometimes). When this happens, the screen flashes very quickly, the desktop reloads, and usually some or most of the programs are still running. After it happens a few times, then it starts locking everything up, and all I can do is CTL-ALT-DEL for the Task Manager. From all of the research I have done online, this appears to be a very common issue. It appears there are many causes and reasons this could be happening. I have tried system restore to no avail. Does anyone have any ideas of things I can try or other places to look for the answer to this problem? I have made sure that I am free of virus, spy ware, and ad ware. I have downloaded Process Explorer, but am not knowledgeable enough to know if it can help me troubleshoot this problem. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance! I guess I should add that I am running Windows XP SP2 on a Dell Dimension 4600.

 

Sorry for the delay and thanks!

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the welcome and the advice! Sorry for the delay in posting a response. I had tried the advice from that article before when I was having this issue, and it didn't seem to work. This time I disabled ALL shell extensions (not just context menus) and it seems to have worked thus far. I haven't had the time yet to go through each item one by one to see which is the culprit. It has been confusing to troubleshoot this problem, because I have made lots of changes to my system in the past few months. I have added and removed various software, startup/registry tweaks and fixes, and added hardware (external hard drive, IPOD, DVD Burner). Anyway, everything seems to be OK for now- Thanks again!