Why Does Windows Explorer Constantly Crash ?

Question

Every time i use windows explorer , like going through my documents , or control panel or anything like that it crashes completely and its been getting on my nerves for ages now !! Please Help !!

Answer 1

There are a million things that cause explorer to crash. To many programs running with not enough memory, lock ups caused by buggy software, severely fragmented hard drives, corrupted files ect...

What causes crashes is when the computer is expecting one output from a program, and it gets something that it doesn't understand / know how to handle.  The program then closes to prevent further damage to the system. In some cases the program wont close, and that causes the whole system hang until you go in and manually kill the processes (from control panel)

Viruses/Malware/Spyware can also cause this.

I recommend defragging the hard drive, running a GOOD free virus program Like AVG 8 or AVAST, possibly adding more ram. If none of this works,  as a (next to) last resort you may want to try a system restore back to a point before the crashes started.

Failing that, you may need to repair XP using the XP installation disk.

If you are getting a specific error message every time the program crashes, email it to me, I'll see what I can dig up.