opening certain folders crashing windows xp?

alright here's the problem when I goto open a specific folder it will end the explorer.exe process, (Windows XP btw) I can open the containing folder and the surrounding sub folders. At first it was one folder of anime vids. luckily I had a backup on a seperate partition. that folder does the same thing. Now it's spread to my folder holding all my mp3's.
I just got over a wave of virus' from a website I normally visit that got hacked and redirected, don't seem to have any other adverse effects and i've been watching my registry and processes.
it's only a select few folders, and other folders full of similar files work which took out my guess that it had something to do with xp file viewing options where they preload the first frame of a video or display mp3 info.
I can't seem to isolate what is causing these particular folder to crash and trying to open the folder through any other program will cause that program to crash. The files should be good, and the virus scanners haven't picked anything up in them, plus I happen to have older static versions of these files on a backup partition that do the same thing which rules out the chances taht I dowloaded a viral file or something

help I'm vexed and on top of that I can't even listen to my music or precious boondocks episodes.
anything else I should look over?

 

a perplexing problem.

still do it in safe mode prehaps? just for a test?

if not, try your static backup on a different machine.

and when you say "the virus scanner", to which are you refering? some are easily compromised by virii

 

Sounds like lots of your files have become corrupted. That happened to some directories of mine once, and whenever I opened certain ones they crashed explorer. Sorry, and hope you got backups

 

Is the folder set to thumbnail view?

if so try deleting the thumbs.db file and trying again.

 

Ive got this same problem -- Whenever I access certain files, and folders in a directory, it crashes explorer.exe. The best part is that so long as I dont click ok to let explorer get on with restarting itself, I can access the files, move them, open them, whatever, it all works, just manages to crash explorer.exe...

-Cameron

 

Sounds like a codec problem. Most likely NOT a virus problem. Download something like KLite Codec Pack, install, and you should be good.

 

okay, an update. I ran in safe mode, to kill some virii and trojans that I couldn't do in normal mode. it sounds like it is a virus of some sort, all the files are there and they all play and work, I thought it was the thumbnail file which I deleted no difference. on top of that seems like there a few virii that despite my best efforts are eluding me.
as far as virus scanners I'm just using spybot S&D, adaware, tea timer, some stuff to monitor my registry and processes. what ever is afflicting me is crippling my system in normal mode, but I'm writing from this compy right now in safe mode.
any virus scanners suggested, the trojans are goldsun, winhound, alphacleaner, and some othe stringed exe types "brfmfmngr.exe" is an exmaple. those are what I haven't been able to ditch.

I know where most of these are located problem is I don't know what is spawning em, so I can't go old school Dos boot, and delete em.

any suggestions. I haven't tried booting into normal mode again, but I have a feeling its gonna be the same problem, it seems one or two of these bugs will crash explorer.exe when ever you scan them or try to open their containing folder (which isn't among my music or boondocks episodes)

 

I'm telling you... I'm 99% sure it's a codec issue...

 

got a 64bit processor?

 

Try disabling caching thumbnails, then running some cpu-intensive task in the background - video encoding/dvd ripping etc. Then open the folder. With luck, the thumbnails will be generated every second or two, until one crashes explorer. Then, you can disable thumbnails, and delete/repair the file.

 

Had the exact same problem with my girlfriends laptop, turned out one of the videos was corrupt, deleted it via command prompt and everything is sweet.

 

I had the problem too... Turned out to be a RAM problem as my computer randomly restarted, not sure if you have that issue.

It may be completely unrelated.

 

I agree, and K lite is just gonna make it worse though.

Get CCCP and uninstall ALL you other codecs.

 

A few of you guys are mentioning corrupted files, now if the problem is spreading wouldnt that suggest bad hard drive sectors?

 

i asked if he had a 64bit processor but got ignored, the windows built in protection thing can cause explorer to crash if the option is enabled on an xp machine

 

Just fixed this problem and basically thats how i found this forum (hello all btw) ! Its a codec issue as some people already suggested.. I runed a "Codec Tweak Tool" that was inside my K-Lite Codec pack and chose to detect broken codecs.. It turned out that i had some missing files and so it suggested to remove the codecs completely .. After cleaning those "not-working" codecs i tried to open the folders i had the problem (all of them included video files ) and there was no trace of that annoying "explorer.exe has encountered an error and has to be terminated" or any other kind of error !!

If you want to give it a try.. Here is the tool i used..

Code:

http://rapidshare.com/files/116774599/CodecTweakTool.rar

(Direct link)

 

I'm SURE he's got it fixed by now. After all, it's only been 2 years.

 

Damn me.. Didn't notice the Year ... I am so sorry..

 

Don't worry about it. Welcome to the forums.

 

lol.. i do that sometimes too. ^^; Welcome to Bit-Tech