Right Click makes everything redraw after SP2

I just installed SP2 with no installation errors.

Now when I right click on any Quick Launch or Desktop icons the whole screen redraws itself and I lose some of the System tray icons. I can right click on the system tray icons without this happening.

Any ideas?

WindowsXP Professional 2600-SP2
Compaq Athlon 1 gig - 512K RAM
Nvidia GeForce MX/MX400 - 64K using latest Nvidia drivers. AGP
SoundBlaster PCI 16

 

Have you tried re-installing your graphics card drivers after SP2 is installed?

 

I reinstalled the drivers and I enlarged the icon cache. No go. That's all I could think of to do.

Thanks lforster.

 

i would bet your explorer is crashing. you can either use the debug analyzer to analyze a crash to find out what DLL crashed.

Or just use ShellExView to disable all your third party shell extensions, and the enable them one at a time until you find the culprit.

 

Thanks Joe. I downloaded the debug stuff. It looks interesting but I'm not getting any dumps and there are no entries in the Event Logs. I double checked, and I am configured to write dumps.

The shell extension thing is going to take a while. I expect you're right about Explorer crashing. I found it is also happening when I right click on anything in the start menu. If I work in any of the directories ( Start Menu, Desktop, etc) using Explorer itself, everything works fine, I can right click to my heart's content.

 

Do you have a pagefile on the system drive? If not, you need to have one to get the dumps. The pagefile has to be at least 2MB in size. That's more than enough for a mini dump.

 

Well. since you have the debug tools. you can try the following commands
open a DOS prompt

Code:

cd\program files\debugging tools   (or whereever you installed it)
adplus -crash -pn explorer.exe

Do your right click thing, and youll get a dump. This will latch the debugger onto explorer and force it to write a dump.

please note there is a goofy bug in my tool, the dump will be in some crazy long directory name, with a crazy long name. Move the DMP file to your c:\ and analyze it from there. sorry about that, ill fix it one day.

zander, for userdumps( crashing application) you dont actually need a pagefile, thats only for blue screens. My guess is something is its not blowing up in the usual way for drwatson to see it, or something has registered as the exception handler. Possible that the dr isnt set to write dumps, or doesnt have permission. DRWTSN32 from start->run and verify all is setup correctly there (especially 'create crash dump file')

if all of this is too scary, i wouldnt blame you for not doing it. Next step would be to do the disable Property Sheet Handlers using that shellexview. I'd really appreciate it if you bear with me a bit though. Whatever extension is crashing for you, is going to be crashing for others, so it would be spiffy if we could get it identified.

 

No need, Joe. You nailed it. It was a shell extension: EncodeDivXContextMenu Class

All is fine. I imagine that I can reinstall the DivX codecs and it will be ok again. I'll let you know.

Thanks a million. You saved me from a ton of heartache.

 

I de/reinstalled the DivX codecs. The shell extension EncodeDivXContextMenu Class still crashes Explorer. Everything is fine if I disable the extension and it's not too important anyway.

 

Thanks for the info Joe. I didn't realize that. You're way ahead of me with this type of thing. I thought I'd mention it because it's always the first thing that comes to mind when someone tells me they don't get a dump when their puter crashes. I saw edger has his\her experience level as experienced so I thought the possiblility existed that the swap file had been moved. So.....

 

Thanks for the followup edjer. Good to know what it is, in case anyone else has the same problem we can send em in for a surgical strike, instead of a fishing expidition.