Clicking on My Computer, My Network, My Documents, explorer.exe (desktop blanks out and then everything reappears) crashes and restarts. If in safe mode with networking, everything works great. If rebooted in diagnostic mode, still crashes. Is there some way to strip explorer.exe down to it's essential function? I have read posts here stating that many other programs can tie into it. I have reinstalled over the top, reloaded sp1, ran two different spyware & AV cleanup tools and all current updates.

Try looking @ these SPECIFIC areas in the registry:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shellex



* They're 2 of the areas that allow right-click of folder "shell extensions"... you can attempt to strip those down to remove some of what applications add-on.

(Once you "strip" what you think is extra-addon deadweight, or what is causing your hassle, reinstall any service packs you have (including hotfixes after that) & see if that fixes it).

APK

P.S.=> That's ALL I can think of offhand/off the seat of my pants w/out thinking about it more & spelunking about the registry for where more "shell extensions" may be initialized from... which sound like you suspect is your problem (one or more of them going nasty)... apk

Addendum:

If you have any restore points set, use one (one set on a date that was JUST BEFORE this started happening to you).

You have those available to you if you use Windows XP or 2003... on Win2000, if you use Roxio/Norton/Symantec "GoBack", it supplies an analogous feature (the ability to rollback your system to a time where it ran correctly prior to a 'bug' like yours appearing).



* If those are not an option, another possible is to use F8 bootup, & use "Last Known Good Configuration" bootup menu option... iirc, it saves 3 prior registry states & perhaps one of those is your "fix" potentially...

A fix potentially, because it may correct a registry data error that abend/errs-you-out due to erroneous data for that entry or a bad program inserted @ launch (or, bad location of said program rather possibly).

Good Luck, hope this helps point you in the RIGHT direction to a fix... you have 3-4 avenues to pursue now!

APK

I had explorer.exe crashing every time it ran on an W2K machine today. After patching with KB835732, running a system file check, running a repair from installation media and comparing the file size and date of explorer.exe to a known good version (which was the same), I finally just extracted explorer.exe from the original installation media and moved it to the winnt directory. That finally fixed it. Although the file size and dates were the same on the known good explorer.exe and bad explorer.exe sometimes the obvious really is the answer....

Other symptoms of the problem were that I could not run the control panel from the command line and I could not get explorer.exe to run even in safe mode (this may differentiate your difficulty from the one I ran into).

Good luck!