Windows Explorer crashes ?

[The Nr Fairy]

Odd, this one. My lappy, which up till now has been brilliant, has an odd problem whereby when I navigate, using the Windows Explorer through to Network Places then to a specific workgroup then a specific computer - when I click on a remote machine to see what shares is has, the desktop Explorer session dies, then restarts.

Lappy is a Win 2k machine, fully up to date with patches - remote systems so far which have shown the problem are a Win XP and my home Win 2k desktop.

Any ideas - Googling or searching M$ support site comes up with nothing relevant to "windows explorer crashes" or similar.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

The Nr Fairy,

Try to isolate the problem. Try to access any other computer with your Notebook and see if it can be duplicated. Then try accessing the computer from another computer (other than the Notebook) and see if you duplicate it again.

Take Care,

Richard

[The Nr Fairy]

IT fails with at least two computers on different networks, and from the desktop trying to see the laptop, that works fine.

Leads me to the initial conclusion that there's a software prob on the lappy, I'll run SpyBot later this morning, and report.

[Ausatco]

I have this problem intermittently on both my machines, too. There seem to be 3 modes of failure:
[list=1]
Windows Explorer does a restart - All the icons on the desktop are cleared, as is the taskbar and tray. Then the desktop icons are refreshed and the taskbar and tray return. No harm done, computer is as it was before the event.
Windows Explorer does a restart as above, but this time not all items in the tray are restarted. Some of these are start-up items, such as my software firewall, malware scanners, etc. The machine appears to run ok, but because it has obviously had a hiccup and is not in the same state that it was preveiosly, I usually reboot it to clear its head.
A window pops up "We are sorry. Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close" etc, with an offer to report the problem to MS. The machine must be rebooted to recover from this event.
[/list=1]
These events seem to occur only when I am exiting a program, but not always the same one.

In the last case the replies from MS always blame a device driver, but MS has never been able to identify which one and I have never had the time to pursue it because it is a very intermittent problem.

AA

[The Nr Fairy]

Spybot comes up with nothing.

Even when typing in \\Remote_machine in the location bar in Windows Explorer, it dies.

Odd - I'd like to fix it, I use it a lot !

[stickyb]

What's in the event log?

Win2K quite often outs useful diagnostic info in there.

[The Nr Fairy]

The Event Log !! I never thought of that.

When I force Explorer to die, it does come up with an event which says:

A driver packet received from the I/O subsystem was invalid. The data is the packet.

The packet data is related to LanMan Redirector stuff. Odd.

Off to Google, thanks for the pointer.