the explorer process crashing

recently, i have been experiencing frequent crashes of the explorer.exe process under win7 x64. i have since run various malware scans, including microsoft's own, checked for corrupt win 7 files, as well as googled on the issue a little bit. i've found some reports associating this issue with shell extension conflicts, and have done some very minor tweaking using shellex, but as i am not sure what i should really be looking for, i have not come up with a fix yet.

i would really appreciate any tips on solving this.

thank you!

thank you.

i have filled out the sys specs based on the tool you provided.

as regards the shell tweaks-- i used the shellEx x64 tool, and i believe these are extension names i disabled:

acronis secure zone
acronis true image shell context menu extension
VersionsPageSHellExt Class (also related to acronis)
BRU context menu handler (bulk rename utility)
MBAMShlExt Class (malware bytes)

in laymen's terms, shellex is showing a couple of other extensions as 'not disabled', albeit with a pink background; and i am unsure what that is an indication of. those are winrar's extensions, 'shell extension (x64) for altap servant salamander', 'microsoft XPS rich preview handler', a bunch of dropbox's extensions, and a 'sorcerer shell extensio' (sic).

thank you!

i've run the test and it did indeed come up (and reset) some files; unfortunately the cmd shell closed so i cannot tell what the affected file(s) were (edit: unless this gets logged somewhere - ?)

i will have to see now if the issue continues to show...

thank you again.

Callender said:

I can't say that I'm an expert on this but I did have the same issue "Windows explorer has stopped working" and after some research found that it could be down to a whole range of issues. I decided that the most likely cause was a corrupt media (image or video) file somewhere on the HD. That's just one possible cause that you could investigate. I'm sure that other forum members will help you check out the other possible causes.

After checking all jpeg image files for corruption the problem remained so I moved all personal image and video files onto another HD and since then I've been problem free.

See: Error: Windows Explorer has stopped working

You can use JPG Cleaner to scan for and bulk delete corrupt jpeg files:

Rainbow Software - Programs

Download link is hard to spot. It's in the blue box below the description.

Settings that I used:



I didn't manage to find a similar method to deal with other image file formats or video files. I just moved any folders of images or videos that I had personally created off my hard drive onto an external one.

This might not help in your case but in my case it did indeed solve the problem.

Good Luck!

thank you very much for the detailed response! i have to admit however that this explanation seems most unusual to me (i'd understand a corrupt .dll or other piece of code is critical, but a random jpg file that may not even be accessed, seems so very strange to me!).

i will keep it in mind though, and failing the system file checker scan i just did, i can try it.