Explorer Preview Pane crashes then works after closing error message.

Whenever I use the preview pane in Windows Explorer to view the contents of, say, a .reg file, .txt doc, or .ini file, it crashes with "Preview Handler Surrogate Host has stopped working". I click the "Close the program" option, which is followed by an Application Error: "Exception EAccessViolation in module ShellEh428.dll" etc. I close that as well. Then the preview pane works without having to close and reopen the Explorer window. In fact, if I do close and reopen it, it happens all over again.

It's not that big an inconvenience since the Explorer window itself doesn't actually crash, but it'd sure be nice to find out why this is happening and if it can be prevented.

Sounds like your dll file may be corrubted, you can try downloading that dll and replacing the one on your pc and see if that resolves your problem.

Have you installed any codecs on the machine? These are responsible for thumbnailing objects in explorer and can cause explorer to crash. If not, try launching an elevated command prompt and running "sfc /scannow" to see if windows can locate and fix any corrupted systems files responsible for this.

Through trial and error, I managed to tie the issue to an app in my msconfig Startup Items. It's a freeware app called 4t Tray Minimizer that I've used since the early XP days. Not wanting to eliminate the app, I went to the programmer's website to report the issue and found a newer version that was released a few months ago. Updated to the new version and the preview pane now works flawlessly.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to help me with this!