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Windows Explorer Stops Working

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MrGED05:
I've gone through each of the steps Tweaking.com Windows Repair V2.4.2.  I devoted an entire Saturday to getting my blasted Windows Vista 32 bit desktop to function properly.  Windows Explorer will function when looking for a file, deleting and opening a file.  Sadly, anytime I use "rightclick", "Cut" and then attempt "rightclick" to get to "Paste" it quits.  A popup button notifies me that it has quit working and that it will restart but it does not.   

Shane:
When that happens that is normally caused by a dll file that is hooked to the right click menu and is causing the problem.

Back in XP days in order to have a right click option on the right click menu a programmer had to make a dll to hook into it. This ended up causing a lot of problems as badly written dll files would cause explorer.exe to crash. And starting with vista and newer MS finally gave a way to have right click menus from the registry instead of a dll file.

So from the sounds of it you have a program that installed and hooked a dll file to the right click menu.

So the trick is to remove and cleanup the right click menu and maybe even try to find out exactly which dll file is causing the problem. See if this page helps you any
http://www.guidingtech.com/144/how-to-edit-remove-unwanted-applications-from-right-click-menu-in-windows/

Shane

MrGED05:
Shane,
   Thank you.  I'm going to give it a try with Regedit (which I greatly fear using).  I'm hoping I'll find something obviously hooked to "right click" that doesn't belong there.  I'll let you know if my computer survives me messing around in the registry.
    Gary

MrGED05:
Well Sir,
    I carefully followed the Regedit instructions to which you directed me.  I added the preface "-" to each entry that I could reasonably think might be responsible for linking an unwanted dll to the "right click" mouse key.  That didn't solve my problem.  I can still highlight, "right click", "copy" but when I get to the target folder any attempt to "right click" or "paste" causes Windows Explorer to stop working and a popup appears that Windows explorer is re-starting but it never does.
    Have you any other suggestions?  Should I try adding the "-" preface to every entry located in those registry folders?  I fear that doing so will make all of the "right click" options disappear.
    Thank you,
    Gary

Shane:
Lets try this.

Grab this
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

When you run it go to the top and click on the view dlls button (It is in the middle below the menu)

When you do that a window will open down below. Now click on explorer.exe in the top list. You will now see all files hooked to explorer.exe :-D

You will see a lot but at least you will be able to see what is hooked to it. Go to file and save as and it will save that info to a txt file. You can post it and I can also look at it and see if I see anything that stands out. :wink:

Shane

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