I am working on a Dell Studio 1735 with Vista. It's two weeks old. I have two accounts, this one and the Admin account, which is not working. When I log in to the Admin account, it boots up and then I get the error message that Windows Explorer has stopped working and Windows is checking for a solution to the problem. It then restarts Explorer, all my icons on the screen disappear and reappear, and then I get the same message again about Explorer stopping. It's a continuous loop. I cannot click on anything during this process and have to ctrl+alt+del to soft-boot the computer again. Thank God I created a second account or you wouldn't be reading this.

Help please?

Ricki

P.S. It was running fine yesterday. I shut the computer down in the evening, just the same as I always do, and when I restarted it in the morning it began with the loop. I didn't download any programs or make any changes before I shut it down.

I have been having problems with Vista not allowing programs to run duing startup, but they haven't been programs that I've bothered about or that have affected what I want to do with my computer. Is this another one of those? Vista not allowing Explorer to run during startup...?

I'm at a loss. Even if we work out what the problem is, how will I get into the Admin account to make the required changes if it won't load Explorer??

Log on with your second account and go to C:\Users\Admin\Desktop\. Obviously replace Admin with whatever you called you admin account. It could be that there is an item there that is causing explorer to crash as it tries to generate a thumbnail. If this is the case the explorer will crash again, then what you have to do is work out which item is causing the problem and use cmd.exe to delete it. I will talk you through that if I turn out to be right about the problem...

Seems to be solved... Using the second account (ie, not the Admin one) I went into the Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings (on the left) > Advanced tab > Performance Settings > Data Execution Program. I've been in here a dozen times to turn off DEP for various programs (COM Surrogate, Internet Explorer, Pinnacle Studio). I then added the Windows Explorer .exe file to the list and voila! No more error messages.

I read somewhere (on this forum?) that DEP is a useful tool and should not be disabled carte blanche - but I'm getting to the stage where I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

Thanks for your help, Jon... it was your initial suggestion that led me to (what appears to be) the final solution.