Guardian Angel said:
Hello EyeInTheSky and others.

I know I haven't posted in this thread in a while (2 weeks); but, I wanted to give you an update on what I have learned/done. I looked through some post online and was trying to figure out why explorer.exe was crashing. Every solution I have tried didn't work. Every few days, explorer.exe would crash. I then thought maybe, it wasn't the startLayout at all; but, some other setting in the Group Policy Editor that caused Explorer.exe to act up. Last week, I went through almost all the setting I changed in Group Policy Editor back to default. Sure enough... a week has gone by and no more explorer.exe crash.

Now I am in the process of restoring (one by one) the setting I changed in Group Policy Editor to pinpoint the explorer.exe crash. Finger cross. I will update this thread when I find the culprit (hopefully).

The problem I see with that approach, is that systematically you cannot pinpoint any one culprit because it may not just be one; but a combination of settings that trigger the crash. In other words, one setting may be safe without the other; but how do you know exactly which one is safe with the others if you have more than twenty settings you have tweaked?

The built-in Windows steps recorder can possibly be a way to pinpoint the culprit rather than trying to unlock the combination of events that trigger the crash.

Adding one by one setting at a time doesn't necessarily pinpoint the culprit; but rather highlights when a combination of settings or events aren't suitable for normal Explorer.exe function processes. The problem then arises that you may never figure out the safe combination of settings to use together, because if you have more than twenty settings; the combination of settings is astronomical and it would be luck to figure out which settings can safely run together without a steps recorder program to capture the event log when the failure occurs.