Explorer.exe error

[FooAtari]

Got a strange problem with Vista and Explorer.exe. I have searched google far and wide and cant seem to find anything like this issue.

Vista loads fine, desktop loads normally and all appears well until I try to run windows explorer, or the Control Panel, or Display Properties. (But I can run other applications OK, like Nvidia Control Panel for example)

I get the following error...

I only use my Vista rig for games so it's running the bare minimum services and apps. I didn't think I had disabled any crucial services, but I have gone through them and enabled everything that looked like it might cause the above error but no difference.

I have done a spyware and virus scan, nothing there.

run sfc /scannow from both the desktop, safe mode command prompt and the recovery console from the DVD, it does show some messages that it was not able to repair all errors. Perhaps Explorer.exe is corrupt? Can it be replaced?

The last changes I recall making before the problem was uninstalling ALzip and installing 7zip due a to a zip file not extracting correctly with ALzip.

Anyone got any ideas? I really don't fancy doing a reinstall at the moment...

Thanks

 

[Dirk]

'Catastrophic failure' Never heard of that one before. *scratches head*

You've tried most things that i would try to fix this but have you tried system restore yet. If the last change you made was installing 7-Zip you could try rolling back to before that install.

 

[FooAtari]

Yeah it's a new one on me too.

Strange thing is if I end the explorer.exe task from task manager obviously the GUI shuts down and im just left with the Task Manager window, so I then run explorer.exe and the desktop loads. When I try and explorer.exe again, I get that error.

And I can't run system restore, one of the down sides of running the bare minimum is that it's disabled, which kind of sucks right now. Currently the only option I appear to have is repairing visa from the DVD. The only bad things is the time I have spent tweaking and optimizing. What changes will a repair from the dvd make.

I think it might be an idea to start taking proper full system backups rather just the important stuff like photos and documents and the like.

At the moment im running xplorer2 lite to manage files and things. I'll hold out for a fix a bit longer until I take more drastic action