XP SP2 100% Explorer.exe at startup can't do anything.

[Ages120]

Well before this happened I accidently right clicked properties for program files. It looked like it was going to take a long time so I stopped it. I move on and switched a folder from photo album to documents like I intented to do. While I was doing this explorer must have been running but I didn't notice. I then started up IE.exe and then things started to slow down with explorer hogging all cpu time.

Eventually everything hard locked for a couple minutes and I had to restart. Well now when I restart I get to desktop and exploerer is hogging 100%. I can click my computer and get the hour glass like my hard driver is being accessed or it can't get enough cpu time to access it. Since I don't hear my hard drive I think it is the latter.

I really think it was explorer archiving program files to give me the info. Like how many folders total size and such. I am wondering if there is a halt command or something to tell explorer.exe to stop what it is doing. Right now I can't do anything with my computer since it boots at 100% and won't do anything else. I can ctrl alt del to get task manager but thats it. No unessecary processes are going just the bare minimum usual stuff.

I've looked around and found forum posts with similar or exactly the same problems, but people just post check msconfig or run spybot and stuff that has nothing to do with it, or a ms issue about battery life.

CPU Amd 64 3200+
Memory 1gb 512x2 corsair 3200xl
Video card 6800gt
Mother board VNF3-250
Hard Drive Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA Model HDS722580VLSA80
Sound Audigy 2 zs
Tv Tuner Ati Tv wonder pro

 

[onesNzeros]

Is it okay if you start in safe mode? That will narrow it down a bit right there.

 

[Ages120]

Safe mode or debug. Any configuration of safe mode. Directory service restore. System restore. They all did nothing. I learned how to use windows without explorer pretty well though. So far I have reinstalled. I needed to anyways was getting cluttered but this bug is horrible. I am sure it wasn't a virus or spyware/malware cause without explorer running I did full system and in depth scans on explorer.exe and related files. I have a couple guesses but since I reinstalled I can't go through and test them out. I think this bug gets pretty well ignored since it is sounds almost identical to a couple other with hot fixes for them but the none of the others basically hard locks your explorer.exe from startup until you kill it. Also killing the process and restarting it has no effect.

 

[Leros]

I get the same problem occasionally. I just open the task manager, stop the process, the go to run a type "explorer" to restart it.

It isnt a big deal for me, because only a few things trigger it for me.

 

[LiLithTecH]

If you haven't already, make sure to DISABLE the CTHELPER.EXE Service.
(it is Creative's Online Help that loves stealing CPU time, which appears to be Explorer's fault)

 

[Ages120]

I wish either of these had worked. Killing all but vital system processes either from task manager or disabling them or deleting them from the reg didn't help. Restarting explorer didn't have any effect either.

 

[Trente]

I experience the exact same thing; a restart sorts it out for me though. Got XP SP2 with all the latest updates installed, already checked for viruses&spywares, all clean. What gives?

 

[kylef]

Rather than moaning about Explorer.exe, why not actually try to troubleshoot what's causing it?

Download a debugger (Debugging tools for Windows is free) and debug into it.

Or, if you don't know how to use a debugger, download Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com and figure out what thread is running away with the CPU inside explorer.exe. You can also poke around for DLLs that explorer.exe was told to load that look suspicious.

Explorer.exe is a big container of plug-ins, and any time a plug-in has a bug it can bring down Explorer or cause it to hang.

 

[aceO07]

I think this might be related to my other thread about trying to disable explorer scanning of files. It will scan all files in a folder for certain attributes like duration, dimension, etc for media folders. I haven't found any way to disable this 'feature'. Maybe there's a file that crashes this scanning of attributes. I know that on a slow computer it will bring the cpu usage up to 100% for a bit while it's scanning files..

 

[Ages120]

I did debug it. I sent microsoft some emails and they sent me a program that ran before windows even booted and it sent them back the info they wanted. After that I reinstalled. Hopefully they will have a hotfix article about this for whoever gets this.