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Hi guys,
I am getting this irritating error message whenever I open a folder containing an avi file.
"Windows explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close."
and then I have to open all explorer windows back again.
I think windows is trying to read the avi file for caching or something before i even open
it.
anybody if know how to solve this please tell.
Thanks in advance.
It is probably some buggy shell extension. Download ShellExView and try to disable/enable different shell extensions and see if it helps.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I downloaded shellExView.
It's showing some 283 shell extensions.
I can't find anything describing windows explorer though.
Is it safe to disable any shell extensions on that list?
please help.
I think problem is solved.
I tried this after googling.
Start->Run
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll.
Thanks for your time and help.
The extensions are extensions to explorer. They are not explorer itself, so naturally explorer isn't listed.
Firstly look for red highlighted items, because they are suspicious.
Then look for non-Microsoft extensions and try disabling them one by one and see if it fixes the problem.
Alternatively, also get Spybot and scan for malicious software (an extensions).
Thank you Elysia.
I understand that.
After unregistering that dll through that run command,
I refreshed shellExView and found some extensions are gone('AVI property handler' for one).
The number of shell extensions went down from 283 to 277.
I see something connected between the two.
I have not done much windows programming.
Can somebody explain this please?
In short, you disabled some shell extensions.
The long answer: shell extensions are registered in the windows registry. Shell extensions are files in forms on dlls. These dlls handle registering themselves and unregistering themselves. They do so via two special functions, which can be called via regsvr32 and regsvr32 /u.
So by using it, you caused the dll to unload its extensions.
Thanks for that explanation and your time,Elysia.