Explorer Keeps Crashing ???

One of my Windows 7 Home Premium machines has developed a most annoying habit of Explorer frequently crashing and restarting for no reason that I can fathom.

Ninety-nine percent of it's use is in transferring files from a hard-wired lap-top to various storage HDDs (real 3.5" HDD in ext. enclosures) that are USB-connected to this machine.

The printers and scanners are also hard-wired to this machine and all other machines access them via the home network.

I did not have this problem until a few weeks ago and it seems to be more frequent with each passing day.

I will be choosing a folder to move something into and just out of the blue I get a warning "Explorer has stopped working" at which point Explorer immediately restarts, flashing all the desk-top icons and such, and losing all of my navigation.

How do I fix this ?

Thanks for reading and all help is appreciated.

I assume your are talking about file explorer? This normally doto disk errors so run a full disk check and correct all errors

Yes; File Explorer.

It may or may not have any bearing, but the bears end of files being handled are video from a video capture device.
The laptop resides way over there close to the TV so as to have a good close connection to the capture device; I then move whatever videos the laptop captures onto the ext. HDDS that are connected to the problem machine.
I have noticed that sometimes when I click on a folder that the green bar slowly runs across the top while the folder is loading, instead of being more or less instantaneous as I usually expect to see.
I will do the homework that you guys assigned and report back --- unless I stumble upon an obvious solution.
For what it's worth, this machine has been performing this task flawlessly for years and only started having the problem recently.

Lance1 said:

It'd be nice to know either way

Any one of them is good.

You might have registry rot. After a number of years Microsoft registries tend to dry rot. Mine kept crashing a year ago. It was so bad SFC couldn't fix anything. I used third party registry repairs from Glary and Tweaking.com and it went back to normal. I would only use them as a last resort because they break stuff too. I had to reinstall drivers

Without getting too serious and deep into all the possibles, I found this:

Fix: Windows Explorer Crashes in a particular Video folder in Windows 7

Since almost the only thing I do with that machine is transfer and store video files, I thought maybe a fix could be as simple as this.
So, I changed the folder view option; and, right off, I noticed loading a page was probably ten times quicker = no more green progress bar crawling across the top before all the files showed up.
I have since used it several times with no more crashes.

There are a gazillion huge video files in each folder and I guess it is somewhat overwhelming to calculate and display "Details" quickly.

I am fixing to step over there and use it some more and it may crash before I even get started; if so, then I will get more serious about it.
If it is something going haywire with the registry, I do have two back-up plans; I have the C: Drive both cloned to another HDD and a Macrium image stored; either of these are a long time prior to the problem.

Thanks to everyone; hopefully, I won't have to mark this unsolved any time soon.