Explorer crashing every 10 minutes

[Mark R]

I finally got my vista express upgrade (Home premium 32 bit) yesterday. It installed on the 3rd attempt, and it's running OK.

Except that explorer will close every few minutes and then restart. All other apps are fine - orthos, memtest, etc. are all rock solid.

All drivers are the latest vista 32 bit versions.

The error in the event log is:
Faulting application Explorer.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x????????, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x????????, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00042e7b, process id 0x????, application start time 0x????????????????.

The error is always exactly the same (except for the ????s). I've had about 20 of them so far today.

Any idea how to go about troubleshooting this? I've already unistalled all my video codecs, and removed any programs with shell integration (even if nominally vista compatibile).

 

[Idontcare]

I have not experienced this specific error, however in the past I have experienced cases where explorer and certain dll's would crash (you get the pop-up with the info and can only select OK or Cancel, either option doesn't help) and invariably every time I experienced these problems the fault came down to walking-wounded hardware.

In some cases it was an FSB that just needed a tad of a voltage bump, other times I had a bad memory stick, but the kind of bad where you had to run MEMTEST five times to catch the error on the fifth cycle thru kind of walking-wounded crap. (i.e. heat related)

I also had a flaky power supply give me troubles with explorer crashing. And CTFMON, that dam thing crashes like no one's business if you have memory that needs a little more juice (in my case at least).

 

[zig3695]

youve installed windows on top of itself 3 times now? format clean, in fact zero fill that mess and install windows clean. weird problems almost always arise from 'upgrading' existing installs.

 

[Mark R]

Well, I haven't upgraded 3 times.

The first time I tried to install, the installation was aborted because I had nero installed.
The second time, the install completed, then BSODed instantly on first boot, then was automatically uninstalled, and the old XP installation restored - because I had Kaspersky installed.
The third time, the installation completed.

Yeah, I'm sure it's something that's left over from the upgrade. I was just hoping it was something easy to find and kill. However, you're probably right in that it needs a reformat and scorched earth re-install (Do you know if the express upgrade will do a clean install on a blank drive, I've heard that they will only install on top of an existing XP). It's just that it takes so long to backup, reformat, install windows and then install all the apps - that I really want to avoid it.

I'm not that sure that it's a hardware problem. Under XP I would run with big overclocks (C2D and Asus P5B-D), with absolutely no problems. In fact I was only clocking to 3.2, because, although it would go quite a bit higher and pass orthos, I didn't see much point, in risking instability.

Anyhow, even putting everything back to stock, Vista explorer still doesn't work.

 

[Bozo]

Did you defrag before the upgrade?
Have you run chkdsk?
Did you go to MS Update and let Vista download the latest updates?
Have you installed the proper Vista drivers for your hardware? Some XP drivers don't work right.

Bozo

 

[Mark R]

Originally posted by: Bozo
Did you defrag before the upgrade?
Have you run chkdsk?
Did you go to MS Update and let Vista download the latest updates?
Have you installed the proper Vista drivers for your hardware? Some XP drivers don't work right.

Yup. Did all of that.

Anyway, I gave up and reinstalled clean. Vista did quite a nice job of a clean install - it will automatically move all your program files, documents & settings and windows dirs into an 'old' directory then you get nice clean ones with sensible names (instead of crap like Windows.000, and Documents\Administrator.WINNT000).

I also took the time to prepare a slipstreamed install DVD with a few updates and all the vista drivers on.

All working fine now.

however, it didn't stop windows 'problem solver' from stressing about not having any drivers for my X-fi, mobo, and graphics card even though they were all installed as part of the slipstream. I guess the driver installation must have come after windows booted for the first time and freaked.