Windows Explorer Crash?

I've been having a problem recently with Windows Explorer. Whenever I click on My Computer or My Documents, the window fails to open and my desktop and taskbar disappear, much as they would in an Explorer crash - except this happens without any error message. A similar thing happens with Internet Explorer - the program flashes on the screen for a fraction of a second, then disappears. I'm completely baffled as to whether this is a virus (I've run Symantec a few times without finding anything) or a problem with SP2. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Do your event logs (in Admin Tools) give you any hints? Can you open WE another way, for example, WinKey + e ?

An SFC might help:
Start > Run > cmd
sfc /scannow
have your XP cd ready

sfc - system file checker, retrieves the correct version of the file from %Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache or the Windows installation source files, and then replaces the incorrect file.

If you want to see what was replaced, right click My Computer > manage, expand event viewer > system.

Johanna

 

Will the SFC thing work even though I've installed SP2?

 

SFC will not replace a newer version of a file unless the one you have is obviously damaged or missing.

If the problem started after you installed SP2 I'm not really sure what would happen so if anyone knows for sure, I'd love to see a good answer myself.

At this point, sfc should not make things worse. May or may not make them better.

 

From what you are saying with explorer, i would think you have a malfunctioning shell extension.. Perhaps a column handler. Some exploration with ShellExView might be interesting. Possible corruption in the shell icon cache. The fact that it also happens in IE could be a BHO (unrelated) or a bigger issue at work, such as something hosed with one of the shared DLLs. Perhaps a reregistration of the usual shell32, browsui etc..

Ideally, i'd like to see you download the debugging tools and run adplus against explorer to catch first chance exception dumps.

This may be a good one to call microsoft on for direct help. It may turn quite involved before a solution presents itself.

You feeling brave enough to try tshooting this over the internet?