Well this must be the longest running topic in history. Since it started, MS have invented VISTA and I've been experiencing the same issue on my VISTA installation. In fact, the problem is all over forums with no solution ... except for now - thanks to SAGACE. I downloaded SHELLEX and found a number of greyed/highlighted entries.
I highlighted all greyed entries and chose the disable option. I then tried right clicking on an exe in explorer and found no problem! So I then went through each item one by one that I'd disabled, re-enabling each one followed by a right click on an exe until explorer crashed indicating the offending file. The solution took about 5 minutes.
So thanks SAGACE if you're still around, you should be given the "solution of the millenium" award for excellence in tech support or if that doesn't exist then, just a big thanks from us :-)
