Windows Explorer stops/restarts - is there a tutorial?

This is an occasional problem that has reared its ugly head again today - 5 times in the last half hour. All I've been doing is copying files from my laptop's hard drive to the external drive I use as a backup. Considering I'm getting ready to do some actual work :) I would like this to stop.

I checked Microsoft's page but most of their suggestions didn't seem doable (or at least they were "over my head" enough to make me nervous) so I decided to look here. I did try a search but there were too many results to go through. With that many people talking about it I figured there must be a tutorial somewhere but I couldn't find it in the tutorial section here.

So - if there *is* a tutorial could someone please direct me? Or if not, maybe someone has a suggestion for something simple I can try first?

Thank you.

Callender said:

There's a tutorial here:

Troubleshooting Explorer.exe Crashing Issues

See:

Download : Registry Fix

1. Right click on the .reg file and click on Merge.
2. Click on the Run button in the Security Warning pop-up.
3. Click on Continue (UAC), Yes, and OK when prompted.

Upload the dump file that should be created next time Explorer crashes. Someone might look at it to see if it offers any clues.


Check through the other possibilities first though. If you need to download and merge the reg file - it won't take effect and write out crash dumps as described if you have set Windows Error Reporting service to disabled. (In other words it needs to be enabled).


SFC /SCANNOW is likely to detect problems if you've made any custom changes to your machine so it's not always a reliable way of fixing problems.


If could be a hard issue to fix as there are many possible causes. Take a look here:


Windows Explorer Has Stopped Working Fix | gHacks Technology News


You will see that file corruption can be one reason for Explorer crashes. Maybe you have some corrupt image or video files on your hard drive?

Thank you for your answer. It seems like there are a lot of things I could try. That could be overwhelming but I'm reluctant to try the ones I don't understand - which is most of them - so that narrows the field a lot. I'll start with the simplest steps and go from there.