Explorer going mad...

I am frequently (i.e. maybe 10x per day) observing a bug in Windows 7 Ultimate where Explorer suddenly goes mad and starts consuming >95% CPU. Explorer then becomes almost totally unresponsive, the mouse starts jumping around in big leaps, my system's vent goes to full power and it usually takes me 1-2 minutes to finally bring up taskmanager and be able to kill it. After restarting it, things are back to normal - until next time...

This is usually after some file operation, like moving a directory from one place to another, opening a directory, or similar. And - no - it's not, that these directories contain lots of files or anythng special or whatever...

Any ideas? Is there *any* way or method to find out, why it's doing that or what is wrong? This starts getting pretty annoying!

Michael

I really don't know, but I suspect that it is not Explorer causing the problem, it just becomes apparent when using it. I would start by checking out the hardware. Recently, I had some symptons similar to your's and it turned out that the CPU cooler that I was using was too concave to make proper contact, even with thermal paste, and it was wrecking havoc like you described. This wasn't too difficult to diagnose using SpeedFan, because along with the CPU spikes came abnormally high temps.

Another possibility is a defective harddrive, cable or connection.

EDIT: I guess that I can toss in either a defective motherboard, or chipset driver installation.

Nope! You can rule out the hardware! I am doing heavy development work on this machine, i.e. I am developing and frequently compiling and test-running a major project and it does so fine without any problem or instability. I would have noticed if the HW were unstable or had cooling problems or anything of that sort - believe me!

It's always and only when doing stuff in explorer (and it's almost predictible by now, so it seems to involve a few directories only...) that explorer goes spinning when opening (or moving) them...

I ran a check disk but that didn't reveal anything...

Michael