Help Please: Windows XP Startup Error

[Wolff]

I started up my PC today and got a strange error message stating that Data Execution Prevention was shutting down explorer.exe. Dr. Watson then starts up but hangs. I bring up the task mgr to shut down Dr. Watson, then explorer comes back and everything is normal.

It's been like this over several restart cycles now. NOD32 & Spybot don't find any problems. I haven't installed any new programs or Windows updates. The only solutions I can find involve making an exception for the blocked program in DEP but I'm a little hesitant to do that.

I appreciate any light ya'll could shed on this.

Edits:

1). I'm running XP Pro SP2 - and it's not pirated.

2). Starting in safe mode circumvents the issue.

3). I found a page suggesting that the problem lies with an explorer shell extension, not explorer itself and pointed me to a program called shellexview. I could disable all extensions one by one with this utility but there are 267 of them and I'd rather not go through all that.

Thanks for any help.

 

[tk11]

I've been running xp with dep disabled for ages without any problems. If it's giving you trouble I wouldn't hesitate to disable it.

 

[Wolff]

I understand but my fear is that if I do that in this particular case that some piece of as yet undetected malware or whatever is trying to run code in explorer's memory space will do something worse.

 

[mechBgon]

Can you do a System Restore to before it happened?

 

[tk11]

Your fear is unsubstantiated. Regular backups and a little common sence will prove far more effective than all the scanning/blocking software in the world.