Windows 7: Explorer.exe Restart Loop

Last night my computer started exhibiting the rather crippling problem of continuously restarting explorer.exe from the moment I start it up.

Items of note:

*Does not occur in Safe Mode

*Started after an automatic update (3 Windows 7 updates and 1 Cumulative Update)
-One of the updates (I failed to check which) failed to download/install properly. I ran the updater again and it seemed to go through just fine.

*All of my Google Chrome extensions seem to have been deleted

*Killing explorer.exe in the Task Manager goes through just fine; starting it back up again causes the issue to start again.

*Performed a system restore; no effect

*Ran ClamWin, CCleaner, and Spyhunter; no malware detected

Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions?

Well, here's a crazy thing: looks like I might have fixed it mere moments after posting here.

I deleted a DivX video that was sitting on my desktop and turned explorer.exe back on. No issue.

The problem is solved, but does anybody have any insight as to why things turned out the way they did? I'd like to prevent this from happening again, if possible.

I had a similar problem with explorer.exe crashing and restarting when I was running a dev version of chrome a couple months ago. I have had explorer crash a few times while mousing over some ripped movies with unusual characters in the meta information.

When explorer tries to preview a video, it looks to the codecs, when it finds multiple codecs for the same type of file it can get confused / codecs conflict each other. Usually removing the conflicting codec or turning of the previews stops the explorer crash.

And as the vid was on the desktop Explorer was 100% trying to encode the data (including preview) unlike if you were to open Explorer and navigate to the videos library, where it would fail just once and subsiquently every time you tried to open the Video library.

I've found that codec packs usually cause this sort of problem, not to mention adding possible exploits (if one of the codecs installed is quicktime.) :/

Very true, and sometimes a lack of having the right codec