Windows My Computer + Explorer issues

Hi,

For a while I've had an unusual problem with My Computer and Explorer in general in Windows 7.

When I first boot up everything is fine. After an unspecified short amount of time, My Computer stops loading. I open it up, and it just sits there with a totally blank Explorer window with the loading bar filling up extremely slowly (it never loads).

Once this starts happening, any right click in an Explorer window will cause that window to stop responding, and the only way to get rid of it is to restart Explorer.

Also it appears my thumbnails stop all reset to defaults at this point

The only thing that seems to fix all this is a reboot - although only for a short time.

It's rather frustrating, the way I navigate to anything is macro key on keyboard which is set to
Windows + E, then through the Explorer favourites and drives in the nav pane in Explorer.

I'm not really sure where to start, could someone point me in the right direction?

Any help appreciated

 

My first thought would be bad sectors on the hard drive, but it would appear you're using SSDs.
Is the data on these SSDs or on a HDD?

Health of the SSDs ok?

 

Got any CD or DVD drives attached ?

 

Yes two SSDs, no hardrives. I'll will check their health tomorrow when I'm back on that machine. What's the best tool for testing my M4s?

Cheers.

 

As a workaround, you could open task manager, kill exploper.exe and then start it again, that should save you from rebooting.
It might be worth checking you have the latest SATA drivers for your motherboard, and doing a full chkdisk on all drives.

 

might also be worth running malware scans, with malwarebytes

 

Yes just did a full scan, they appear fine. Both are less than 6 months old.

Yes one empty DVD drive.

I tried this, doesn't appear to fix the problem.

Done and done.

Regularly done

This Windows install is fairly old, also has migrated from the old HDD.

Any way to reset/reinstall Explorer or something similar?

Thanks for the help

 

have you tried sfc /scannow ?

 

Try unplugging it.
Sometimes failing CD/DVD drives can cause Explorer to hang while it queries the drive, and gets not response.

 

Done and it removed my custom Windows 7 theme. Ugh back to glaring white. Tried with default theme for a while, problem still occurred.

Done will see how that goes.

I guess now's a good time to mention that I occasionally get "COM Surrogate has stopped working" dialogs. Related to Explorer issues it seems but not exactly sure how.

Thanks all

 

I would make a partition on one of the SSD's and install a secondary Windows onto there. See if it hangs. If it does, you know it's hardware related. I'm guessing it's just a software glitch and a full reinstall of Windows will solve the problem. You will no doubt spend days and days trying to solve this issue. A reinstall will take a lot less.

P.S. Tried a system restore? I know it's "not geeky or cool" but it certainly works wonders and it's very quick and efficient for what it is.

 

I'd really like to avoid that.

I actually thought it was fixed, then one time when I tried to right click a file it happened again. Damnit.

 

It sounds like some third party software is causing it, specifically something that has been added to the Windows context menus.

 

Actually, something adding an item to the context menu and buggering it up rings a bell, I think I had a similar problem one time, can't remember any details though, sorry

 

Does it occur in safe mode?