At the startup of windows XP, i get an error message:
"Windows explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close"
After which i get this second error message saying:
"Drwatson Postmortem Debugger has encountered a problem and needs to close"
Most of the times the system hangs and i need to restart, and if sometime i'm able to get in, i lose my active desktop.. "Restore my active desktop" appears and yet i cannot restore it.
I checked for any virus but the none are detected.
I tried repairing it with my Xp installion cd, but it didn't help.
I'd be really glad if i could get some help...
do you have a lot of video files on your computer or desktop? Sometimes xp crashes if it encounters video files it cannot produce thumbnails for.
Problem: This is a known issue with Windows XP's braindead video thumbnail thing in Explorer. Being a thing invented by MS, it's buggy and doesn't always know how to handle things not supported by MS, and occasionally fails on things it does know how to support too. Every now and again it will crash and take Explorer down with it. Easy to solve thankfully.
Solution:
Windows XP:
* Go to Start -> Run... and type
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
Press enter. Done. It's as simple as that. If you, for some reason want it back, simply do the same thing again, but remove the "/u". That is: Start -> Run...
regsvr32 shmedia.dll
I tried the above fix and it fixed my explorer crashing problems, the fix didn't damage anything. If it doesn't fix your problem it won't make it worst.
well i tried it.
i suppose it seems to have improved somewhat.
i restarted a couple of times and it did not hang and it did not show the drwatson postmortem error.
though the " explorer needs to close" error still appears but thankfully it restarts on its own in a few seconds..
can you please suggest a fix for this too.
The only other thing that I can think of is to make sure that your hard drive are setup to "UDMA" and not "PIO" , you can check this in control panel/system/hardware/device manager/ide ataatapi controllers . check each channel and make sure they are setup correctly.
And if you have multiple IDE drives in your computer, make sure that the jumpers are setup properly. Example don't have 2 masters on the same cable. I've made that mistake before and it causes crashes and slowdown of windows and explorer.
Unplug all your USB devices that read flashcards/ printers with built-in flashcards/ and those usb 4-in-1 extensions. Windows explorer has to read all the usb ports and if one has a problem it will cause major problems.
Also if you have some sort of cd emulation/virtual drive program installed (like ultraiso or gamedrive) you might want to check that. Unfortunately most of the time you have to delete the program to check if it's the problem, If you just disable/exit the program, you won't get a reliable indication if thats your problem. But also check your antispyware programs running in the background. Those programs have to monitor every time drives are access and they can be causing problems.
Also run a scandisk with the block to fix errors on all your hard drives and partitions. If you have corruption in any of the drives it will definitely cause explorer to crash.
well i think it could be a problem with the virtual drive.
i used "Alcohol 120%" to create one, and i suppose the problem had occurred after i tried to uninstall alcohol if i am not mistaken.
now i have removed alcohol but the virtual drive still exits and i used to get a lot of messages at the startup earlier, saying that new hardware found and that it might not run properly as it had some problem, due to the drive.
Can i somehow remove the virtual drive now? You think it might be causing problems?
