Explorer.EXE random crashes with Faulting module name: ntdll.dll

[jancc23]

Hi, I've been using my Thinkpad w520 with windows 7 64 bit professional for more than a year without any major problem.

Recently, the Explorer.exe started crashing occasionally and randomly when I was switching back to a file browser ... The event viewer shows that all the crashes were related to the Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll. The entire message is shown below

Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version: 6.1.7601.17567, time stamp: 0x4d672ee4
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17725, time stamp: 0x4ec4aa8e
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000c40f2
Faulting process id: 0x1c7c
Faulting application start time: 0x01cd60588685360f
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 0ba84f3a-d2d9-11e1-8333-f0def1579de1

I've done some research on google and found that the causes of the similar problem were very user specific, some was caused by faulty codec and others might be caused by antivirus, and it seems that there's no a general solution available.

I would be very grateful if someone could teach me how to export the crash/event as a dump file and let me know what's the culprit application that causes the crash.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help!

 

[IntelliMoo]

Just now for some reason I could no longer right-click on my desktop or the recycle bin without explorer.exe crashing immediately with that same exception code. Since explorer.exe crashes are very often due to shell extensions, the first thing I tried was to disable the nvidia desktop context menu and it cured the problem (after explorer crashed one more time since the shell extension was still in memory). I have absolutely no idea what sequence of events caused this issue to suddenly happen, and maybe just rebooting would have fixed it because there was never a problem with the nvidia thing before.

 

[Layback Bear]

I think this is what you are looking for.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/174459-dump-files-configure-windows-create-bsod.html
You could run sfc /scannow from cmd prompt/admin 3 times boot after each. This checks Windows 7 System Files and repairs if it can. At times this will fix Explorer problems.

 

[chewyboy000]

You should run command prompt with admin and type sfc/scannow

 

[jancc23]

IntelliMoo, I found that the culprit for my case was the nvidia desktop context menu too! Explorer.exe seems to work fine once i disabled the context menu. So I just completely re-installed my nvidia driver, and the crash hasn't never happened since then.

I guess it's the driver update done by the Lenovo update tools caused some problems to the video driver in me case.

So problem solved and thanks for all the replies!