Explorer enjoys dying.

Since Friday, explorer will pop up an error message saying its had enough, so i send the error report to Microsoft and close the box, and explorer magically starts up again. Sometimes it will completely crash and i have to run it in task manager to get it back up. It only seems to do it when i have applications running, but ive been running these long before the errors started.

In event viewer, this is what it says after the first crash

"The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted. "

It says the source is winlogin. Below is what it says after a complete drop out.

"Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2800.1106, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.1.2600.1217, fault address 0x00033aed. "

Any help is appreciated.

 

Hmmm, I have the same ntdll.dll version you do, but my explorer.exe version is 6.00.2800.1221. I wouldn't think that should make a difference, though. XP, unlike Win 9.x, is somewhat self-healing, so the explorer shell will restart after an error such as yours, but you'll usually lose some of the system tray icons representing programs running in the background. To get them back, log off and back on.

Open a command window (Start > Run > type cmd) then type sfc /scannow (note the space before the slash). If that doesn't fix the problem you may have to resort to the Repair Console, using your installation CD.

 

If you have run sfc in the past, your file versions may have been replaced by older versions. Many programs that have been updated may have been replaced by the versions on the CD. The only way to repair what sfc has done is to re-install all the Windows Updates. Though the catalog database will show that these have already been installed, the version changes will not have been recorded in the database.

You may want to download and install qfecheck:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?ReleaseID=35468

Then, go to a command prompt (Start > Run and type: cmd) and type: qfecheck /v
for a "verbose" output concerning your presently installed hotfixes. Qfecheck will verify the integrity of those installations and tell you which need to be re-installed.

 

Abraxas ...

Thanks! That's great little utility. I ran sfc just last week and, although my system has been working fine, when I ran qfecheck just now, I found that two hotfixes needed to be reinstalled.

As it happens, I got my MS Security Update CD in the mail just yesterday.

 

You're welcome. I was recommending this to a lot of people, forgetting that it needed to be installed first.

Though the qchain functionality is supposed to be built in to XP and the order of updates installed is not supposed to matter, I find that many updates, when installed in a batch, don't seem to "take ". Qfecheck helps sort it all out. But, from recent KB articles, qfecheck is not infallible.

 

Well im not too sure what you've told me to do but i took both suggestions and everything seems to be running fine. The scans brought up no errors as far as i can tell.

Thanks alot, i'll surely come back if i have more problems.