What can I do about Windows File Explorer crashing?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
Yeah, it should never, ever happen, but we know how those kinds of things go.
Never say never.
Every once in a while, Windows File Explorer will crash.
The question that I got here, Windows Explorer keeps crashing on me.
Sometimes all that I need to do is open a folder in it and poof, it's toast.
Why? And what do I do?
So Windows File Explorer is what I
consider to be not just the workhorse of Windows, but the face of Windows.
Because when you're running Windows, it's actually Windows File Explorer that's
providing you with the task bar and the start menu and that thing.
If those guys have gone away, well, then Explorer isn't running.
Let me force the issue so you can see what I mean.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and fire up Task Manager here
and immediately go find in processes, in details, Explorer.
E xc, and I'm going to go ahead and just kill it.
And you'll notice right away, my desktop background has gone away.
My Start menu has gone away.
My task bar has gone away.
I'm basically left with nothing. And there's nothing I could do.
I can't click. I can't right click.
It's like the machine is completely dead.
So if I type CTRL Alt delete, I do get this menu
and I've got the item called Task Manager on it so I can at least
fire up Task Manager to start managing my system.
Then run a new task, run Explorer
and poof, the desktop comes back, the task bar comes back, the notification
area rebuilds itself and I'm back in business.
So if you ever find yourself
with Windows File Explorer completely gone and no Start menu or task bar to interact
with, this is how you can at least get it back.
Now, interestingly enough, Windows File Explorer has add ons.
By that I mean, when you install software,
that software has the ability to add things to Windows File Explorer.
It is possible for those things to interact
with Windows File Explorer in such a way that it causes a crash.
How do you determine what these are?
Well, there's no user interface.
There's no actual tool built into Windows
to look for these, what are called shell extensions.
However, there are third party tools.
What I'm going to search for is something
called shell ex view for shell extension view.
And sure enough, there it is.
What we're looking for is this tool from NeurSoft.
Net called basically Shex View that we will download.
We have to go all the way to the bottom
of the page here almostand download the 64 bit, in my case, version of shell X view.
It's in a zip file.
I'm going to go ahead and open the zip file.
I'm going to copy these two files
and then paste them into a local folder so that I can
actually run them since you can't run them directly from within a zip file.
And we'll double click on Checks View.
I'm going to go ahead and close these other windows that we've opened here.
And now you can see that these are all of the extensions,
all of the add ons, all of the things that have been added to
Windows File Explorer to provide various levels of functionality.
For example, when you right click a file
and it says, Open with this thing here, or do something special because you've got
a zip program installed, those are the kinds of features
and functionality that these shell extensions add.
In fact, Windows itself is actually
adding its own functionality to Windows File Explorer by virtue
of having a predefined set of these shell extensions.
In fact, if you take a look closely here, you'll see that there are no fewer than
257 shell extensions built in to this edition of Windows.
I haven't installed all that much.
There's a couple of things that I've
added, but the vast majority of these have been added by Windows itself.
Now what?
Well, now we go hunting.
Based on the characteristics of the crash
you're experiencing, we can start to look for the potential
shell extensions that could be causing your problem.
For example, let's say that whenever
you right click on a zip file, Windows File Explorer crashes.
Well, that implies that potentially the zip utility that you have installed
has installed a misbehaving shell extension.
One way to search for it, we'll sort by product name.
Now in my case, I happen to have 7 zip installed.
It does not have a problem, but if I
suspected it did, then I could right click on that and disable it.
You'll see that there are two items here,
context menu, which is the item that actually adds menu items when
you right click on a zip file, and drag and drop handler,
which is the software that understands what to do when you
drag something onto a zip file or drag a zip file somewhere else.
But these are the kinds of things then
that if I was experiencing a problem that seemed to be related to zip files,
these are the ones I would disable, re boot, and see if the problem continues.
If the problem continued, then I would probably uninstall or potentially
uninstall and reinstall the offending program.
But as you can see, there are a lot of different things.
What I would recommend you avoid
are any of the items that are from the company, Microsoft.
And I say that because those are the ones that are built in.
If there's a problem with those, what you probably want to be looking
at doing is a repair install or some other repair
activity on Windows itself, because that's what these are.
These are a part of Windows itself.
But hopefully that gives you at least
a direction to look in when you've got a problem with Windows File Explorer.
The companion article that companies this video at
Askleo.com/5014
goes into this in a little bit more
detail, gives you a few more examples, and hopefully will lead you to repairing
whatever the problem is you're experiencing.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.