Windows Explorer (Not Internet Explorer) Causing problems

@duplerc
Can't help with your problem but I'm a little curious about the flash drive. Does it have a partition that shows as a CD-Rom drive in Explorer like a U3 thumb drive?

I ask this because Autorun from USB has been disabled in Windows 7 and if the manafuctur of your drive has found a work around without using a CD partition I would love a image of the drive.

Or did you manually run their program?

duplerc said:

Probably the big differences are that I have an SSD and I know exactly what caused the problm in the first place. However, I still do not have a fix. Definitely the combination of SFC/scannow and chkdsk/f do not work on the SSD.

False
This surprised me as I expected the drive interface to look exactly like any other controller to the system, Also, we know that standard Windows utilities have not interacted directly with disk sectors for probably 20 years (ah the delusions of defrag ...). That being said, the breakage is all about broken files, so the repair utilities should have worked, or so I thought.

The thing that caused Windows Explorer to break in the first place was a USB thumb drive with our company's logo on it (made in China).
Industrial spionage.
It has a cute little curving LED chain on it's side that is supposed to show how much of the thumb drive's capacity is in use. When you plug it in, it initiates an autorun and starts patching something in the OS. When I saw that starting I yelled some nasties and pulled it out mid operation. Explorer hasn't worked since.

Now I should say that it partially works. It loads. If you click on network to look at files on other machines, fine. And oddly, if you click on "Desktop" it will show the files on your desktop. But, if you click on either "Computer" or the little + sign under Computer it goes into the failure mode. Two messages are generated. First is says Explorer isn't working, then it says Explorer needs to restart. Then it just goes away with the processes being terminated. You can restart it just fine, but don't click those sensitive points.

One more oddity (at least to me) is that the Windows Common Services mini version of Explorer that is callable as a dialog box to do file load, save and save as operations works just fine. So that code must be completely independent of the main Explorer (would seem to be one of Microsoft's endless sourceses of software bloat - but no matter).

So, does anyone know of SSD unique versions of the disc utilities to perform the SFC and Chdsk functions?

Run MalwareBytes over your computer. When that finishes, run Windows Defender Offline.

Oh I'm sure I did run it.

I believe this is in response to my question so thank you.