Power Manager gauge Crashes Explorer

I made a post about how DWM was crashing on boot, and after more experimenting, i realized that DWM was not crashing, but explorer was. so here is the situation.

I decided to have no startup process and that did not cause explorer to crash. However, I re-enabled startup one by and and found out that the power manager is crashing explorer. However, Power manager DOES NOT crash explorer if I adjust startup a little bit followed by a shutdown. For example, say I have 4 item that launch during boot(one of them include power manager) and that will crash explorer. However, if i add or subtract one more item, and reboot, it does not crash. But if I reboot it again without touching any startup menu, power manager will crash explorer.

So i thought about it, and decided to reinstall Power manager from Lenovo's website, and unchecked "start power manager on boot"(or something like that) during installation and surely, did not crash explorer when I tested it. So i thought I fixed the problem and decided to launch Power manager manually. I noticed that the Power manager Gauge did not appear and went ahead to check the box that launches it. Then explorer crash.

So i think i have isolated the problem to the Power Manager Gauge that is crashing explorer. Anyone have any suggestion on a fix?

Thanks

 

Do you get any sort of a unique error message or just a typical "Windows Explorer has stopped responding," sort of message?

 

I get the typical "This program is not responding..." error. No error code.

 

Power manager usually crashes when it finds a conflict between a setting it controls, that is being controlled elsewhere. Here's an example:

I used to disable my optical drive from the device manager instead of waiting for power manager to detect that the optical drive is idle and then letting PM disable it itself. For some reason this would always cause PM to crash on startup or whenever I would try to run it manually, like you've mentioned, and give me a windows run dll 32 error. As soon as I enabled the optical drive in DM again, the error was gone.

Do you currently have any devices disabled in the device manager?

BTW, are you on 32 or 64 bit, XP or Vista, and which version of PM are you running?

 

I downloaded the newest PM from Lenovo website.

I do not have any device disabled in DM, tho I dont think it is a factor since if i adjust the startup menu via MSCONFIG, the next reboot does not cause any error, but subsequent reboots will.

I am running Vista Home basic 32bit. Tho, do u think power option plays a role?(ie, if vista say high performance and PM say energy saver)

 

bumpaitybump

 

Different power options might have something to do with it. I guess you should try creating a custom power plan for windows and then try controlling everything from power manager.

I'm sort of out of ideas so my only other suggestions would be try uninstalling/reinstalling again and if that that fails, try a system restore. Also, try uninstalling the power manager along with the power management driver, then first reinstall the power management driver, then reinstall the power manager. Just a shot in the dark though...