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Explorer crashes, every 10 minutes...
Wells wrote:
About every 12 minutes or so, I have the explorer crash. The symptoms are "only" a refreshing of the taskbar and the disappearance of many - but not all - of the tray icons. The logs of these crashes - about 1000 so far, for the last few days - state "The system shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted" (hopefully I'm translating it using the right MS terms - I don't know what the exact equivalent of that message is in the US XP...) They're listed as "source: Winlogon; no category; event identifier: 1002", with nothing in the hex dump. It's beyond infuriating. I tried every fix I could find, ran windows update, sfc, Norton's regscan (I won't even mention the regular AV and spyware scans), but nothing even decreased the regularity of this. It just happens for no reason - I could be browsing online (from Firefox, obviously), watching something, running NASA's Worldwing, writing, or just letting the PC stand and idle with nothing running, and the crashes will happen, regardless of anything else... 1. Does the crash happen at regular intervals? Your post starts out suggesting that it is every 12 minutes, but I'd like you to clarify that. If this is really the case, then something must be running in the background doing something every 12 minutes that is causing the error. So if this is accurate and the crashes aren't random, do clean-boot troubleshooting: Clean Boot - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=310353 and How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP - http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560 2. If the crashes are actually random, it's time to do some hardware troubleshooting. I'm happy to give you some troubleshooting steps, but please post back first with the answer to the actual randomness of the event. Malke -- Elephant Boy Computers www.elephantboycomputers.com "Don't Panic!" MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User |
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Wells wrote:
It does seem to happen regardless of what I'm doing. Right now, I just tried one thing; I sat down, ran Sysinternals' File Monitor and had it log every file access, waiting for the crash to happen. It logged about 3 KB of text during the 30 seconds or so when the crash and explorer restart occurred... it's below. At that moment I was only reading a cached web page, opened quite a while earlier. Using PS Tray Factory, I can restore the icons that disappear, but the problem is with the crashes, and restoring the icons is like putting cotton under a leaking hole in the roof instead of trying to patch up the hole... unfortunately in this case I can't even see the hole. (The KAVICHS thing is from Kaspersky's Antivirus, but I had the program many days before the crashes began) (snip log) OK, I'd start by doing the clean-boot troubleshooting, including stopping Kaspersky. Just don't go on the Internet while you're testing and you'll be fine. Lots of people love Kaspersky and I know you said it has worked for a long time, but it was dreadful on one of my testbed machines. You need to eliminate all extraneous programs and processes first. Here are the links for clean-boot troubleshooting again: Clean Boot - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=310353 and How to Troubleshoot By Using the Msconfig Utility in Windows XP - http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560 If you still get the crashes in a clean-boot state, then start hardware testing. If you don't get the crashes (and give it enough time, not just a few minutes; let it run in the clean-boot state for a number of hours), then you know it is some piece of software and you have to find it by the process of elimination. It is a tedious process, but it is useless to be anything less than methodical in troubleshooting. Here are some general hardware troubleshooting steps: 1) Open the computer and run it open, cleaning out all dust bunnies and observing all fans (overheating will cause system freezing). Obviously you can't do this with a laptop, but you can hear if the fan is running and feel if the laptop is getting too hot. 2) Test the RAM - I like Memtest86+ from www.memtest.org. Obviously, you have to get the program from a working machine. You will either download the precompiled Windows binary to make a bootable floppy or the .iso to make a bootable cd. If you want to use the latter, you'll need to have third-party burning software on the machine where you download the file - XP's built-in burning capability won't do the job. In either case, boot with the media you made. The test will run immediately. Let the test run for an extended period of time - unless errors are seen immediately. If you get any errors, replace the RAM. 3) Test the hard drive with a diagnostic utility from the mftr. Usually you will download the file and make a bootable floppy with it. Boot with the media and do a thorough test. If the drive has physical errors, replace it. 4) The power supply may be going bad or be inadequate for the devices you have in the system. The adequacy issue doesn't really apply to a laptop, although of course the power supply can be faulty. 5) Test the motherboard with something like TuffTest from www.tufftest.com. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes it isn't. Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out suspected parts with known-good parts. If you can't do the testing yourself and/or are uncomfortable opening your computer, take the machine to a professional computer repair shop (not your local equivalent of BigStoreUSA). Let me know what happens. Malke -- MS-MVP Windows User/Shell Elephant Boy Computers www.elephantboycomputers.com "Don't Panic" |
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