win7 x64 random explorer crashes

[THRESHIN]

i'm still quite new to win7 so any help is appreceated. running ultimate x64 on my system and i'm getting explorer randomly crashing every now and then. it restarts itself in seconds, so its only a minor annoyance but still i'd like to fix this if i can. i'm not even sure where to begin with something like this....

very little running in the background, my driver for z-board, ati driver and nod32 v4 (64-bit version i think). this has happened ever since i installed win7.

i do run folding both CPU and GPU but weather they are on or not does not seem to make a difference. here are my system specs for the curious:

c2d e4500 (stock 2.2, o/c'd to 2.9. very stable, backed it off a while ago from over 3Ghz)
2GB DDR2-800 OCZ ram
gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
sapphire 4870 512mb
sound blaster x-fi xtrememusic
corsair 620HX psu
2x dvd burners both on SATA
250GB SATA WD drive
250GB SATA seagate drive
80GB IDE WD drive
both video and cpu are watercooled with a triple 120mm rad.

as far as i can tell from all the stress testing i can do i have no hardware or stability issues, doesn't matter what i run. i was actually stable at over 3Ghz but again i backed it off for the once every blue moon crash which was very unlike this.

any ideas would be really helpful, thanks guys.

 

[MrsOldMX]

Check event viewer and see if it reports what causes the crash?

 

[bigdogchris]

Welcome to Windows 7. This issue has been reported before and I also suffer from it. I haven't had any crashes in almost 2 months now but when it happened it was pretty bad. Supposedly it's linked to some plug-ins or programs that have context menus that talk with explorer.exe. All I can suggest is start uninstalling things like that or make sure you have the newest versions of everything if you insist on keeping them.

 

[Snowknight26]

Supposedly it's linked to some plug-ins or programs that have context menus that talk with explorer.exe.

Blindingly uninstalling things in hopes of fixing an issue? Not a good idea.

What is a good idea, however, is to read the technical info when that window pops up stating the program has stopped working, find the culprit module, then go from there.

 

[bigdogchris]

Blindingly uninstalling things in hopes of fixing an issue? Not a good idea.

What is a good idea, however, is to read the technical info when that window pops up stating the program has stopped working, find the culprit module, then go from there.

Thanks for the great input. Unfortunately when it crashed, at least for me, all of the faulting modules were simply listed as explorer.exe. How is uninstalling things, that are not even required a bad idea anyways? That's how you fix some things in the PC world, try combination until you narrowed down the culprit. Do you break more systems than you fix?

 

[Snowknight26]

Thanks for the great input. Unfortunately when it crashed, at least for me, all of the faulting modules were simply listed as explorer.exe.

I've rarely seen that. Nearly all the time there's a module that caused the crash. In this example, I casued FileZilla to crash by killing a thread spawned by ntdll.dll, and lo and behold, ntdll.dll is the culprit.

 

[Tawnos]

you can begin by starting explorer in windbg, then running !analyze -v when the fault occurs...

 

[THRESHIN]

well surprisingly i have not had any explorer crashes in a while....but if its just a win7 issue i'm happy waiting for now...not much here to help any. silly question, how do i check the event viewer?