Troubles with WINDOWS explorer (not Internet explorer) crashing on XP

Stormwatcher

Hay guys,
I just did a full system reinstall, and after a crash caused by hardware, whenever I try to alter the properties of a desktop shortcut (for the games that were installed before), windows explorer hangs.

It also does that sometimes when I use the window+E shortcut to open Windows explorer.

I have xp sp3 installed with AVG, Teracopy and Winrar.

Dírhael

My first thought is one of two things; either bad RAM or a bad shell extension. Now normally I would have suggested you to run Memtest86+ for a few hours and see if it fails at any point (if it does, replace the bad stick of memory or try downclocking if you have overclocked your system), but strangely enough I struggled with the same exact problem couple of days ago on both Vista & XP. I battled with it for several hours, and finally managed to solve it. Turns out that it was caused by the SecuROM copy protection that was installed by one of my games (in this case, Race Driver GRID). It [the copy protection] had been updated by the latest patch and one part of that update was a new shell extension that caused explorer.exe to crash repeatedly when trying to right click shortcuts, sometimes when launching Steam...yeah all sorts of strange problems really. I'm mentioning this because you're talking about installed games, and a lot of them these days comes with this specific form of DRM hell. In my case, to solve this all I had to do was remove that extension by hitting start->run and running the following command:

regsvr32 /u "%windir%\system32\CmdLineExt.dll"

You could also try regsvr32 /u "%TEMP%\CmdLineExt.dll" as it can be located in your temp folder, depending on permissions etc.. Don't worry about this breaking your game(s) that uses SecuROM because it *will* be re-enabled as soon as you run these games again (so don't forget to remove the shell extension again after you've quit playing).


If that doesn't help you then what I will suggest is that you download ShellExView (a freeware tool that'll list all registered shell extensions and also allow you to enable/disable them) and look over all the entries that are highlighted (all the non-MS ones will be marked in red). Disable them all [the red ones] and see if the crashing stops. If it does, start re-enabling them one by one until you find the one causing the problem. If you're still stuck then follow my first link and have a go with Memtest.

Stormwatcher

Holy crap, dirhael, your tip seems to have fixed it.
I love you to death, much hugs

now I only have to fix my P/S2 keyboard port that seems to have died one me, thus making it impossible to enter setup.

Dírhael

Stormwatcher wrote: »

Holy crap, dirhael, your tip seems to have fixed it.
I love you to death, much hugs

now I only have to fix my P/S2 keyboard port that seems to have died one me, thus making it impossible to enter setup.

Happy to hear it worked for you (it was the SecuROM part of my suggestion that worked, right?) The PS/2 port on the other hand might be more of a permanent problem though. When those ports goes, it's usually nothing you can do. They're actually surprisingly fragile, and you can even kill the entire motherboard by just unplugging a PS/2 mouse/keyboard while the PC is running should you be unlucky enough..

Stormwatcher

Dìrhael wrote: »

Stormwatcher wrote: »

Holy crap, dirhael, your tip seems to have fixed it.
I love you to death, much hugs

now I only have to fix my P/S2 keyboard port that seems to have died one me, thus making it impossible to enter setup.

Happy to hear it worked for you (it was the SecuROM part of my suggestion that worked, right?) The PS/2 port on the other hand might be more of a permanent problem though. When those ports goes, it's usually nothing you can do. They're actually surprisingly fragile, and you can even kill the entire motherboard by just unplugging a PS/2 mouse/keyboard while the PC is running should you be unlucky enough..

Yeah, it was securom... Score one more for the "let's screw the paying customer" team. I think it was Supreme Commander... Which was promptly uninstalled.

And I didn't even unplug anything, the port on this 2-day old board just stopped working.

Maybe I could install another port through a PCI card? I hope so, I don't want to send this mobo back.

Dírhael

Stormwatcher wrote: »

Dìrhael wrote: »

Stormwatcher wrote: »

Holy crap, dirhael, your tip seems to have fixed it.
I love you to death, much hugs

now I only have to fix my P/S2 keyboard port that seems to have died one me, thus making it impossible to enter setup.

Happy to hear it worked for you (it was the SecuROM part of my suggestion that worked, right?) The PS/2 port on the other hand might be more of a permanent problem though. When those ports goes, it's usually nothing you can do. They're actually surprisingly fragile, and you can even kill the entire motherboard by just unplugging a PS/2 mouse/keyboard while the PC is running should you be unlucky enough..

Yeah, it was securom... Score one more for the "let's screw the paying customer" team. I think it was Supreme Commander... Which was promptly uninstalled.

And I didn't even unplug anything, the port on this 2-day old board just stopped working.

Maybe I could install another port through a PCI card? I hope so, I don't want to send this mobo back.

It's a bit frustrating isn't it, to think that those who have downloaded and cracked the game don't have to struggle with these problems...but those of us that have paid for the game gets punished
I didn't uninstalled my game, I just made a batch file that runs the game and removes the shell extension silently after I exit it. In the case of GRID, something like this (the "/s" switch makes it so that no dialog pops up telling me that it's removed):

@echo off
GRID.exe
regsvr32 /u /s "%windir%\system32\CmdLineExt.dll"
regsvr32 /u /s "%TEMP%\CmdLineExt.dll"

and saved it as start.cmd in the same folder as the executable, then changed my shortcuts.

...

PS/2 PCI addon-card? It's possible you could find such a thing somewhere, but if your motherboard is just a couple of days old then surely it must support the use of a USB keyboard for BIOS configuration etc.?

Stormwatcher

I did uninstall SupCom earlier, anyway... something crashed during the update and it got borked.

My MOBO should support USB keyboards, but I don't think it does... Is there any trick to make that work?

Bob-omb

Go into your BIOS and make use USB Keyboard / Mouse is enabled.

hope that helps

Dírhael

Bob-omb wrote: »

Go into your BIOS and make use USB Keyboard / Mouse is enabled.

hope that helps

Correct me if I'm wrong Stormwatcher, but as I understand it I think the problem with that would be that he can't actually get into the BIOS and enable anything as long as he doesn't have a working keyboard there [in the BIOS].

...

I do find it strange that the BIOS isn't already configured to support USB keyboards though, most are these days. You could always try resetting it completely by locating and using the reset jumper on the motherboard.

Stormwatcher

Bob-omb wrote: »

Go into your BIOS and make use USB Keyboard / Mouse is enabled.

hope that helps

I'm typing this from my wife's computer...

The whole problem is that i just CANNOT enter the BIOS at all. Now things got even worse, I installed some intel motherboard drivers and windows won't boot, so i actually NEED to solve this problem so that I fix my pc without replacing the mobo.

I tested a simple USB keyboard, I plugged it in each USB port and tried to boot. Its numlock LED lights up, but neither DEL (BIOS), F11 (boot disk selection) nor F8 (windows troubleshooting) respond.

God damn it I'm at my wit's end...

EDIT: Yay, resetting the CMOS did the trick and ressurected my PS/2 Port. Thanks all!