Hi guys, I know I don't post here often, but I'm trying to help out a co-worker that's having trouble with her daughters laptop... it's a Dell Inspiron 1520 running Vista Basic. The issue I'm having is right after logging in, explorer.exe will begin crashing and restarting and then it eventually fails to reload and I'm left with no GUI. After that, I tried opening task manager to run it, but as soon as I type anything in the run dialog, task manager crashes. I don't really have any experience with Vista and I've never had an issue like this before. So, I'm at a total loss... does anybody have any suggestions or a recommended site I can check out? -Thanks ray:
There are two options that come to my mind: The first one is some program or service crashing explorer. It can be a badly coded program (possibly a program using functions that only work on Windows XP, and in Vista lead to wrong service calls, making explorer crash), an unsuccesful installation of a program that was integrated in some way with explorer, or the most probable, spyware and similar junk. Try to enter in safe mode and install Spybot: Search & Destroy and make a search for spyware. If you have no luck or you can't boot in safe mode you'll have to reinstall Vista. The other option is some corrupted system file crashing explorer. This is not that rare and most of the times happens with no apparent reason. in this case formatting and reinstalling from scratch is the best choice. And BTW, the task manager 'Run...' command crashes because it relies on the explorer service to work.
Thanks for the tips... I ended up trying just what you suggested a little while after posting here. I booted into safe mode and ran an AV scan with AVG and after rebooting explorer didn't crash. (even though I'm not sure that AVG actually found anything) I took the opportunity then to install Malware Bytes and Super Anti-Spyware :lol: and both programs did find and remove some stuff, so it seems like that was definately it. Eveything seems to be running good now, so I guess that was definately the problem. I'll post again if the problem returns and it turns out to be something other than spyware. For now, case closed. Thanks for the suggestion, z. :icon_bigg Happy that I ended up on the right path. (EDIT: I did not know that tidbit about the 'Run...' command either, I'll have to remember that for later)
