God Help Me and Windows Explorer

[malice19]

What is with Explorer, you would think by now MS would have found a way to make the Dam thing a tad bit more stable.

I have herd of people using different shells? but am not sure,

Problem i have is that explorer keeps Sticking where all of a sudden nothing i click on like the start menu of and thing on the desktop will interact, also when i
Ctrl, alt, Del to get task manager to appear it will, but if i try and drag it about of move it, it look like you have just completed Solitaire where the cards smudge???

Only thing i can do is close explorer and then run it again from task manager, then it will be fine for an hour or so and then happen again.
and yes i have formatted my Pc many time but thought i would just see if any one can show me the light and find any way i can get explorer to work or be more stable....?

Thanks 4 your time.

[Fod]

what apps are you running in the background? i would try shutting them all down, then bring em back one by one to try and pinpoint the culprit. if it's not that, then, probably some config file is borked somewhere....

[Paul Adams]

What is with Explorer, you would think by now MS would have found a way to make the Dam thing a tad bit more stable.

Explorer is a user-mode application which can be tweaked to hell and back by 3rd party code, the problems come about when this 3rd party code behaves erratically which results in 1 of 2 things:
1. "Explorer.exe has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down"
2. The problem you are seeing - it is the responsibility of the processes in Windows to repaint their displays and when they become non-responsive these functions either take a long time to complete or never return

Your desktop is simply the first instance of Explorer.exe, so when this one stops repainting you get the symptoms you are seeing.
What stops the repainting? Chances are a "blocking" operation - the process is waiting on an internal function call to complete, and this function call has no timeout and is waiting on something that will never return.
Unfortunately if the process has been patched/hacked/hooked then the code doing the block is most likely not Microsoft code.

Some patches are made as modifications to files on the disk so are "hard coded", and some are hooks from other processes which run in parallel - for example skinning utilities or tools to add multi-monitor functionality not native to Windows.

To troubleshoot this issue I would start removing programs 1 at a time to see if stability is restored and identify the problem program - beginning with skinning utils.

[TheAnimus]

As Paul says the problem probably isn't directly MS's fault, however i've always found my problems with explorer aren't caused by programs which do "naughty" hooking techniques, but by ones which claim to use legitimate methods.

Explorer is very configureable, you can even make code that will be run everytime you right click on a file. I would guess its one of those programs thats doing it, just like acrobat reader tends to make weird things happen if you allow it to use OLE this is probably the same with explorer. Fundimentally its bad that explorer hasn't been overhaulled in a decade and still uses rather easy to have bugs in COM technology.

LiteStep is an example shell that use to be the coolest thing you could be running on your computer back in '98, but it still used explorer to browse files and the like.

[malice19]

Thanks 4 all the Posts, has been an eye opener, will start looking into what is running and step by step diagnosing which programme could be coursing this problem.

Thanks again.