Rundll 32 has stopped working........

I was in my Personalisation settings today and I clicked on themes to change the theme back to a more basic Vista theme and I start getting that pop up about Windows Host Process Rundll32 has stopped working. I'm sure someone's seen that before. Annoying to say the least. Anyway, it was coming up the minute I clicked on OK at the end of the change. Just for checking sake I went through the rest of the display settings to see if was elsewhere and it came up when i used the Display feature also. What to do? Any suggestions other than "sending a report to Microsoft" who never seems to answer. It seems to be a very hard problem to trouble shoot.

 

You can check your event viewer log for errors, but I wouldn't worry about it too much unless it happens repeatedly. Does it? You said it happened twice.

Try running a chkdsk /f c: from the command prompt, answering Y and rebooting. That'll check your disk for errors. Ruling that out would be step 1.

Also you can run sfc /scannow from the command prompt if you have your windows disc handy. That will check your core system files including all those DLLs (except 3rd party ones).

If it persists, then the next place to look is in your list of startup programs. Updating your graphics drivers is also worth a shot. You could also try removing any extra themes you have installed.

 

Take a look in your event logs to see if there's a more precise error that got logged there.

The mere fact that rundll32 stopped working is a little bit like telling you that someone died because he stopped living - in other words, rundll32 is used for so many different things by so many different bits of software, that you need more specific info to diagnose the problem. That info should be in your event logs.

 

I've done just about everything I can think of including going to event viewer and checking the logs and following prompts to the Microsoft Tech pages and following some of their fixes. Plus I followed the poster's suggestions above you and used the command prompt to check disk and scannow. Even found some corrupted files and fixed them. Just not the Rundll32 stopped working error. This error seems to have confined itself to the IE browser and the Personalize/Display/Theme parts of the setup. It's probably something simple that I've left unchecked or there is something conflicting with Vista's touchy feelings. I just can't put my finger on it. If anyone has any other suggestions feel free to jump in.By the way, I use Firefox as my browser 99% of the time and I haven't seen that error once when I've made changes. I also just installed ESET NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 a few days ago if that makes any difference.