win7 explorer.exe crashes on start up-- infinite loop!

substance12

Senior member
Nov 6, 2000
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literally... all of a sudden explorer.exe started crashing on me in win7. Every time i reboot I get this issue and the computer is unusable. it goes into an infinite loop doing this.

sometimes I get a message saying "error hresult e_fail "

this morning I started to see new messages (avira and gmail notifier crash reports) that didn't show up the 10 other times i rebooted.

this problem comes up when I boot into safe mode too.

I managed to get into system recovery and I restored to an earlier time... same problem. there were a few restore points. and here's the odd thing... I went into what looked like a native windows 7 boot where it gives you options to do a restore, repair, check memory, etc... and it said i had no restore points!

I'm about to do a clean install unless someone has some magical answer. Mods, you can move this to computer help if it's more applicable. i felt like this was equally valid in the OS forum.