hey guys, i'm using windows vista ultimate edition (OEM). been stable since i first installed it in march.

today i started getting this problem. explorer.exe crashed, it restarts itself, then crashes again, and continues doing this until i manually end the process.

i have no idea what happened?

i've done
sfc /scannow in cmd, and it didn't find any errors. ran spybot and didn't find anything. i run nod32 antivirus with updated definitions, and it didn't pick up any viruses before this problem started happening.

i formatted the C drive, started reinstalling my programs again, and the problem started occuring again. (msn, winamp, nvidia drivers, skype, nothing shady..).

installed windows xp pro sp2 on another hard drive, and installed nod32 with updated definitions, and scanned the other hard drive (with vista on it, and my data partitions) and no viruses were found. Installing AVG to see if it can pick up any viruses.

any help guys?

my computer specs are:
CPU opteron 165
RAM Gskill 2GBHZ 2x1gb
Motherboard DFI LP UT Ultra-D
Graphics Card 256mb Gainward 7900GS Golden Sample
Audio X-Fi XtremeMusic
Power Supply Antec TPII 480W

EDIT: the problem still persists in safe mode which leads me to believe the problem is not software/driver related. i'll unplug my hardware one at a time to see if it fixes the problem

EDIT: doesn't seem like hardware is an issue. test my ram to see if it was faulty with memtest86+ and no errors came up for 5 passes. my guess is something corrupted a windows file. so how do i go about restoring windows files? thanks

I'm having the same problem. I was infected by a trojan. I've cleaned the virus but the problem persists. I've read in another thread that it could be a shell.dll corruption problem, but I don't know how to repair that. any idea?
c

If you have the installation disk (Vista) you could try running the repair utility. I'm not sure if you have to boot from disk to do this but you will get the option to either do a fresh install or repair.

__________________
AMD X2 6400+ 3.2GHz BLACK EDITION::SCYTHE SAMURAI COOLER::GA-M51 M/B::3GB DDR2 6400RAM::GEFORCE 8800GTS320/625/900MHz DRIVER '174.74' BETA::160 RAID 0 SATA2::SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY/'DANIELS' DRIVERS::LITE-ON DVD RW/PIONEER DVD::HIPER 530W MODULAR::THERMALTAKE ARMOUR Jr CASE::RAZER COPPERHEAD MOUSE::VISTA HOME PREMIUM SP1

I believe I'm infected with this as well. How did you remove the virus? Any solutions yet?

Most likely you have some shell extension that isn't entirely compatible with Vista. View shell extensions by right-clicking on any file and check what kind of choices you are offered (like "Zip with WinZip..." etc). When you spot that some program has installed shel extensions, remove that program and make sure every registry entry related to it is removed as well. Restart and see what happens.

This error is related to the parental controls, either uninstall the family one care program or do the following.

1. Enter Regedit
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{4f3ed5cd-0726-42a9-87f5-d13f3d2976ac}
3. In the left pane, right click {4f3ed5cd-0726-42a9-87f5-d13f3d2976ac}, click New, and then click Dword (32 bit) value.
4. Rename the value to NoExplorer, and then set the value to 1.
5. Close Registry Editor, and then start the computer.

all should be well again.

cheers, Dave (clumsy@xtra.co.nz)