explorer.exe shell crashing HELP!

[techpet 0]

Clicking on My Computer, My Network, My Documents, explorer.exe (desktop blanks out and then everything reappears) crashes and restarts. If in safe mode with networking, everything works great. If rebooted in diagnostic mode, still crashes. Is there some way to strip explorer.exe down to it's essential function? I have read posts here stating that many other programs can tie into it. I have reinstalled over the top, reloaded sp1, ran two different spyware & AV cleanup tools and all current updates.

[overworked 0]

I had explorer.exe crashing every time it ran on an W2K machine today. After patching with KB835732, running a system file check, running a repair from installation media and comparing the file size and date of explorer.exe to a known good version (which was the same), I finally just extracted explorer.exe from the original installation media and moved it to the winnt directory. That finally fixed it. Although the file size and dates were the same on the known good explorer.exe and bad explorer.exe sometimes the obvious really is the answer....

 

Other symptoms of the problem were that I could not run the control panel from the command line and I could not get explorer.exe to run even in safe mode (this may differentiate your difficulty from the one I ran into).

 

Good luck!