1st Crash: "Good Screen Of Death" ??? huh?

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit running on HP DC7600 4GB RAM 250GB 7200rpm drive.

well, well, well... first crash after three happy months of crash-free computing :sarc:

I was managing a USB-attached laptop drive using Disk Management and when I went to expand a partition to include free space on that drive [it was showing as drive E: at the time] my screen froze, went black, after moving the mouse it came back with some fleeting message about losing Display. Then the process of expanding the partition hung and the Management function/applet hung. So I clicked 'close and look for solution' and that also hung. I tried to invoke Task Manager and the system froze and the bottom tool/taskbar went away completely.
At this point my desktop looked "normal"... it looked fine, except that all control of Win7, visually, had vanished. mouse buttons produced nothing. I had a lovely background image, and a movable cursor, and nothing else. Disk light showed no activity.

Finally had to power off. It was slow to come back up and offered boot options - I chose Safe Mode. Came up ok. Restarted and got back to normal.

What WUZ that?????

That was explore.exe crashing for some reason. Run check disk, memtest, and it doesn't hurt to do an AV scan.

ah... i see... how comforting.

Well, if it happens again, usually you can still open task manager with ctrl+shift+esc. From there you can restart explorer.exe. Click File, then New Task and type in explorer.exe to do it. I've done it a few times.

Is that a little more comforting?

click "file" from task manager?

In the top left corner there is a drop down menu type thing that says "File". From there you have two options "New Task (Run)..." and "End Task Manager."