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

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"