Okay, let me start by saying I'm not sure if this is the right fourm for this question, but I didn't know where else to go. I'm running XP SP2. I've been having issues with AVI files for a little while now, so let me just jump right in with the problem.
First, whenever I used to right click AVI files, it would inevitably crash my Windows Explorer. It didn't really matter which AVI file it was. I checked around the web and found out about shellexview and taking away the bad context menu handlers. My information mostly came from this site. None of this worked for me, so I then found out about running "regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll" to eliminate AVI previews. This has fixed the problem, however I now get no Duration time in my Explorer. While I can live without this and can deal with it as a solution, it is rather annoying, and I don't know why Explorer suddenly decided to start crashing. I don't know if anyone else can think of a viable solution to this issue, but any input would help.
My second issue is that the same files are crashing both my Media Player Classic (which I use primarily) and my Windows Media Player. They do not crash VLC Media Player. I have used the applications to check on whether or not I have the proper codecs, and they seem to say that I do. I've upgraded MPC and my codecs and this did not seem to help at all. It's curious as to why MPC and WMP would crash but not VLC. These files have never had any issue with this type of thing before.
I cannot help but think that both of my problems are completely related since they both seemed to start at about the same time. Does anyone have any solutions or ideas? Thanks.
If you have installed codec packs, I would uninstall them and try MPC and VLC again.
If they work then it suggests it's a codec problem - VLC and MPC use codecs local to themselves - not system codecs that are installed by these packs.
If you don't have codec packs then it may be that you have an older version of e.g DivX or XviD that are causing the problem;these codecs can be uninstalled from the start/programs menu or Control Panel.
Okay it's fixed. I uninstalled my codec packs and it worked, so I reinstalled the packs and it still works. Something must have been outdated or corrupt? Either way, I enabled my AVI previews again and explorer no longer seems to be crashing. Thanks for all your help.
