Windows Explorer not responding?

I don't know exactly where to put this because I don't know if it's a general or m15x issue. But anyway, sometimes when I try to right click or delete a file Windows Explorer will just stop responding and restart. It's rather annoying. I've heard doing a clean Vista install might work but are there any other alternatives?

 

i think it's a general vista issue. few weeks ago my IE took 5+ minutes to initiate every time.

 

Hm, . No solutions available? This is windows explorer btw not IE. I personally prefer Firefox. ^^

 

Yup.

ctrl+del+alt open the task manager and force explorer closed, then on the task manager file>new and type in explorer.

Why it's doing that I have no idea. It depends what you're doing on the computer, what you have installed, and other small things like heat etc.

 

Heat is fine, this will happen off a fresh start up. I still have like 50 gigs of free space left on my internal system drive. I'll literally be trying to just like delete something, for example an old driver 177.72 (Good driver but I use 177.83 now) and Windows Explorer will just crash. I don't need to end it, it will restart itself but for now I have to move stuff to a folder and delete the folder to get rid of it.

 

Sounds like something running in the background would be causing it. There's no real reason it should be doing that unless there's something you're loading on start up that conflicts with explorer. :/

What that is, sorry I wouldn't be able to say, just my theory.

 

I would love to investigate it further but its hard to get a crash dump from you and do a crash analysis. I am suspecting a third party program causing it. Do you have any extra context menu items ? disable them and see if that fixes it. If nothing works out... still you are not in a stage to reformat your machine. Every time explorer crashes it generates a crash dump file in windows directory. Call up Microsoft and they should be able to tell you the exact reason and process causing it. Again as I said.. most likely it is some program which is hooking the context menu and trying to add some items in there.

 

load Firefox and all your troubles will be gone.

 

People, he's not talking about Internet Explorer.

He is talking about the Windows Explorer.

Looks like you got yourself a little virus friend.

 

DOH! me bad

 

Run a HijackThis scan and send me the log file... it should not take much time to figure out if thats a Virus activity or some buggy program

Get HijackThis from here - http://hijackthis.de/

 

I had this problem as well.

I couldn't right-click most icons to access their settings nor delete or copy them, but I could do just that with folders. Windows Explorer would stop responding and then restart.

I am far from a tech guru, so I tried the things I usually do when things go wrong. First I ran Windows in safe mode, same thing still happened. I then did a System recovery to about a week ago even if I had not made any major changes since then.

Problem solved. No idea what caused it.

 

yea same here instead mine isnt the right-click

it was when i tried to open control panel it would restart...also when i try to open the network conenction thingy it would restart =(

 

Sounds like a virus activity to me. I would recommend to do a virus scan and see if it found anything. Also can you try to open regedit or cmd to see if that also crash it. I remember there was a virus with similar symptoms but cant exactly remember its name. Pass on a HijackThis log and I might be able to figure out whats going on there.

 

I am not sure who you're responding to, but I've ran NOD 32 and SpyBot Search & Destroy and found one bad cookie before I did the system restore, although it did not solve anything.

I've also done the scans after the system restore when I no longer had the problem, and found nothing.

I have no idea to what caused the problem, the only thing I don't have on my computer now that I had then is Neverwinter Nights 2, admittedly I used an non-official patcher (although it's officially accepted as a better way of patching the game) in order to get the it working.

I suppose that could have screwed something up, but as I said, I have no idea and the problem is gone now. Would you still have any use of the log?

 

I was responding to thread starter and any other person who might be facing this issue. If you no longer have this issue then the logs will not show anything fruitful and you really cant do postmortem with that log. That log will only show you what is being loaded by machine on startup, what current programs running. Who all is hooking up in System, IE and other such stuff

 

Ok I just registered to say how I solved my problem.

findvikas adviced totally rocked!

Problem:
Windows Vista SP1
Whenever I right clicked an item on the desktop explorer.exe would crash.

I knew my software, did clean boots and nothing.

Till I stumblem on this thread.
Hijackthis found a stupid unused registry entry... and fixed it.
Right after that right-click and explorer got along!

1. Download Hijackthis
2. Do a system scan and save log file
3. Go to http://hijackthis.de/
4. Upload file to analize
5. Check for a strange registry entry (in the kind collum there will be a cross)
6. Tell hyjackthis to fix that entry
7. FINISH

Hope it helps!!!