I need to find what's randomly restarting Explorer.

Galane · 12 Dec 2018

Recently, I've been having Explorer seemingly randomly restarting itself. Usually when I select and right click a bunch of files to copy, move etc.

Two recent things that happened were a bit of annoying malware that got past Defender. Backing up a couple of restore points and scanning with Malware Bytes and others seems to have got rid of it. Nothing I've scanned with finds anything out of sorts. I ran rkill after doing the restore point restore and it found nothing.

The other was I setup Hyper-V (after the malware incident) to run a second Win 10 install. But that's not been running when Explorer restarts itself.

Just got done upgrading to build 1809 and whatever is buggin it, that didn't cure the problem. I was rounding up some .m4a files to run through Format Factory to convert to MP3 when *blip*. Explorer windows and taskbar all vanished then the taskbar came back with all the quick launch icons but on the right, it only restores tray icons for things that launch at startup. Any running program that has a tray icon, it doesn't bring those back.

OS is 10 x64 1809 on an AMD FX6100 with 8gig DDR3, GPU is nVidia GTX 1050.

Ztruker · 12 Dec 2018

Look in Event Viewer, see if anything there looks like it could be the cause. Also check Reliability History (Do a Cortana search for reliability to get to it).

Galane · 14 Dec 2018

Lots of stuff in the Event Viewer logs. I was able to pretty much make Explorer crash at will, simply by right clicking a folder then Properties - but sometimes it *wouldn't crash*. Same thig with right clicking and clicking Delete. If Explorer crashed it would still do the delete.

So I searched for windows 10 explorer keeps crashing and found a lot of people having problems with this, ranging from fairly rarely to constantly every few seconds.

One thing that was a common "Try this" was clearing the automatic destinations. Drop this into Win+R
%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

Delete everything in the folder.

I also cleared the logs, figuring I would then make Explorer crash and it would be easy to pick the relevant info out of the logs.

Of course it won't crash now! Hopefully it will keep on not crashing, but the next time it does I'll go right to event viewer and it should be among the latest log entries. 'Course I've had it go for hours and hours without a crash, then it'll pop off several times in a row.

dalchina · 14 Dec 2018

A good approach where a context menu entry causes explorer to crash is to disable all added context menu entries, see if the problem has vanished, then enable them in turn to identify rogue ones.

Start with Shellexview (free) - easy to find. Don't disable MS entries, and no need to log off or restart.

Note this will not find all context menu entries. For more see e.g. Autoruns (free from MS) but a lot more daunting at first.

Galane · 14 Dec 2018

Here's an export of the last few events from the application log. I right clicked on a large folder tree then clicked Properties. BLIP!

What does the event for that instant say?

The shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted

Really? I had no idea!

I see there's something in there about audacity. Why would that be doing anything when I'm not using it? It *should not* have any processes running when the user isn't using that audio editing program. It's getting uninstalled.

EyeInTheSky · 14 Dec 2018

Galane said:

I see there's something in there about audacity. Why would that be doing anything when I'm not using it? It *should not* have any processes running when the user isn't using that audio editing program. It's getting uninstalled.

I currently use Audacity recording software. However, what I have noticed recently, is that Microsoft is currently making it harder and harder to find compatible software for recording sound coming through the computer. Recently, my Free Hi-Q recorder program that I bought and paid for with free lifetime upgrades, currently quit working after the last two Cumulative updates to Version 1809.

Oddly enough, at the same time, Free Hi-Q cannot be reached by any methods I have tried. Basically, they took my $14.99 and ran with it after something changed in the Intellectual Property Rights documentation.

Thus that led to me trying Audacity. It still works, although I fear this Intellectual Property Rights issue is causing third party vendors for recorders to become extinct.

Remember DVD Decrypter? I can still use that to this day and it is better than some you pay for.

All in all, Intellectual Property Rights are destroying honest home users who just want to record and not re-sell property. The internet is being punished at every turn on this and I feel it is reaching a tipping point that says even though you own your own hardware, we are going to control and tell you how to use it-------period!

Long story short, I think Microsoft is incorporating source code into their Cumulative Updates to cause glitches every time you try to record or edit something that is clearly not owned by the end user.

And not to mention "Open Source" as being a problem as well. Someone should've thought that through more clearly before offering the public "Onion Routing" capabilities. I say public, because the Navy at one point, was the only branch of the military to actually have the capability of using the Onion Router techniques to protect sensitive communications.

I believe it kept the country safe; however, the downfall is it ended up in the civilian sector or able to be used by civilians and it all went south and side-ways at the same time.