I know there have been some other threads about explorer crashing but they only seemed vaguely similar to whats happening on my computer.

I can start windows explorer just fine and use the expand and collapse plus/minus signs to navigate through the tree on the left side panel. But as soon as I goto view any of the contents of ANY folder, it crashes. (Hope that makes sense) Everything from Desktop, my hard drives, opticals and network drives; all causes it to just close explorer imediately. Nothing comes up in the main panel like it should when you left click on a folder in the tree. It also plays a sound as it closes explorer but I have all windows sounds turned off so I dont know where thats coming from. What does work however is if I go through My computer and use the single window view to browse through the folders.

Im fully up to date with XP SP2 and Norton Antivirus updates and came up clean on the full system scan. Ive also tried doing SFC /SCANNOW and that didnt come up with anything.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Does this happen also in safe mode?
If not, then there can be somekind software conflict, perhaps with shell extensions.
When this started to happen? Have you installed/removed anything lately?

Yeah, it works just fine in safe mode. As of what happened recently, I havent installed or removed anything, but I did have some RAM go out on me right before this all started happening. Comp froze day before last and upon reboot I was getting all kinds of random errors and random reboots because my first slot of RAM took a dive. Only after about 3 hours of troubleshooting and prolly about 100 reboots (mostly BSODs or random reboots) I finally narrowed it down and found all kinds of errors when I ran memtest86. So I removed the bad RAM and was getting everything back to the way it was before the RAM went out when I noticed the problem with Windows Explorer.

LoL, so after booting into safemode to test it there and then rebooting back into windows regularly, the problem is magically fixed. I musta rebooted 10-20 times yesterday hopeing it would go away but I guess all it took was one run through safe mode. Thats windows for ya, lol.

Thanks for the suggestion.