Can't close a frozen windows explorer in Windows 7

I'm running 7 on a Dell desktop which has worked very well for 5 years. All this started because I had made a video on a video camera and put the S-drive in my desktop to view it, something I have done many times before although not recently. I opened up the drive and saw the files but as I tried to open them, explorer froze. This has caused me to turn the computer off and reboot twice--the problem makes the taskbar disappear. I have used task manager to try to shut down explorer, and I get the prompt asking me if I want to shut it down and click yes, but it won't shut down. Oddly, although my taskpar is gone, replaced by a gray linoleum pattern at the bottom of my screen, google chrome is working just fine as I type this.

I will turn the computer off again now and pull the drive out manually when it's off. I don't have to work with this video. But I do want to solve this problem, obviously.

KaiserD2

Hello KaiserD2

In case @Paul Black suggestion did not work for you, you could try the following.

When the Taskbar disappears,

Press Windows Key + R
In the Open box, type explorer.exe <Enter>

See if that re-gains control of the Taskbar. It might help diagnose the situation a bit further, and also prevent needing to re-start the computer.

Thanks for the help. There's no need to rerun this experiment at the moment. It looks like it has something to do with the SanDisk or its drive, though. The disk works perfectly well within the video camera for playback, but as I said, i couldn't open the videos successfully. One did open in DIVX but it played much too rapidly, like a Chipmunk song. Weird.