Explorer.exe keeps crashing

Try uploading a report after downloading and merging "Registry Fix" or "WER_Explorer.reg" from the links in this tutorial:

Troubleshooting Explorer.exe Crashing Issues

Backup (Export) this registry key before going ahead:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting

Zip and upload the dump found in "C:\LocalDumps" next time Explorer crashes.

I've never known it not to work. Check that Windows Error Reporting service is enabled.

Start> Run

then type

services.msc

Press Enter

Scroll down to Windows Error Reporting and set startup to Automatic

Also confirm that you did reboot after merging the reg file?

Okay a few questions. Do you have a page file on your windows partition which is larger than the size of your RAM? Do you have plenty of free space (25Gb+) ?

Check that your system is configured to write out crash dumps:
Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Startup and Recovery, click Settings (or Startup and Recovery). Under write debugging information select full memory dump. If you still don't get a crash dump you can try selecting small memory dump instead to have your system write out crash dump files that are smaller.

If you can't get a crash dump for Explorer then really the options are:

Disable shell extensions (non-microsoft)

Remove any software that installed a shell extension if you no longer use that software.

Check for updates for all software that you have installed that also installed a shell extension.

In the meantime instead of using Explorer to browse files try Explorer++ portable. If it doesn't crash then it is definitely a software issue. You can pin Explorer++ to the taskbar for quick access.

Also would you download UVK Portable version and use it to create a log as it will show the main shell extensions that integrate with explorer? Then upload the log (text format)

Settings needed:

Right Click UVK icon and choose run as administrator. From the welcome screen choose "Scan & create log"

Don't mess about with any built in UVK fixes as they can cause serious problems if not needed.

If nothing obvious shows up it will mean downloading some software that can show all shell extensions.

Will check back here tomorrow.

Tracking down problems can be tricky. As you can see from the tutorial linked in Post #2 there can be many reasons for the problem. If you have not scanned with UVK and created the requested log yet - try this first:

Download Autoruns then extract the files to a folder on your desktop and right click autoruns.exe then choose run as administrator. Wait for the scan to complete and you should then see the word "ready" appear at the bottom of the window.

Click the "Explorer" tab and disable all context menu handers by unchecking the boxes. Then restart Explorer via task manager.

If the problem persists then it rules out those context menu handlers as the cause. You can re-enable those checkboxes.

If the problem seems to have vanished - re-enable those context menu handlers a few at a time and restart explorer until the problem returns.

If the above does not help there are still more things to try.

Alright so for the first thing, I don't remember how to check my page file it's been a long time since I did that. Also yes I have 248GB free. Secondly, when I go to the write debugging information, I only get kernel dump and small dump, there is no full dump. I set it to small dump because it was on kernel but I'm not sure if that's right. I then used the Autoruns program and disabled what you said. Something strange is that when I was disabling them a few gave me errors saying "Error changing item state: The system cannot find the file specified". This happened with about 6 different ones curiously they were either from WinRAR or WinCDEmu. If you don't know WinCDEmu it just lets me mount .iso files. I guess I am now waiting to see if it crashes again. I will let you know if it does.