Issues with program menus and Explorer populating

[Chigongman]

Explorer in XP Pro has been giving me issues lately. It intermittently fails
to populate program groups such as the Start menu, or program groups on the
Start menu, or the QuickLaunch menu, or the Add/Remove window, etc.

Otherwise, the machine runs great, with the exceptions that it recently
froze and did a spontaneous reboot (resulting in "Windows has recovered from
a serious system error") and recently took a very long time to populate the
Explorer window itself (which in fact took so long that for a while Task
Manager showed Explorer as Not Responding until it eventually populated and
went back to showing as Running).

I've done a System Restore from a date far prior to when symptoms began.
I've run System File Checker. I've run Error-Checking with Auto Fix File
System enabled. I've run the command "regsvr32 /i shell32.dll".

The problem still persists.

MS senior tech support told me by phone that the message I got after that
freeze, "Windows has recovered from a serious system error," almost never
happens except with a hardware failure, and he said it's typically the hard
drive, memory, or video card. (I of course have others with different
opinions on that.)

I've since replaced my memory. Still, the problem persists.

I'm not running Error-Checking with Repair Bad Sectors yet, out of concern
it "might" make matters worse if it is a "bad sector" issue.

I've run a Norton Internet Security full-system scan and it found no
malware. (Next I'm going to also try Spybot, but I'm not expecting this will
prove to be the issue.)

Does this sound like a hardware issue? Bad sectors on the hard drive, perhaps?

Any other ideas what it might be?

Thanks!

 

[vasquelli@gmail.com]

On Nov 18, 3:39 am, Chigongman <Chigong...@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:
> Explorer inXPPro has been giving me issues lately. It intermittently fails
> to populate program groups such as the Start menu, or program groups on the
> Start menu, or the QuickLaunch menu, or the Add/Remove window, etc.
>
> Otherwise, the machine runs great, with the exceptions that it recently
> froze and did aspontaneousreboot(resulting in "Windows has recovered from
> a serious system error") and recently took a very long time to populate the
> Explorer window itself (which in fact took so long that for a while Task
> Manager showed Explorer as Not Responding until it eventually populated and
> went back to showing as Running).
>
> I've done a System Restore from a date far prior to when symptoms began.
> I've run System File Checker. I've run Error-Checking with Auto Fix File
> System enabled. I've run the command "regsvr32 /i shell32.dll".
>
> The problem still persists.
>
> MS senior tech support told me by phone that the message I got after that
> freeze, "Windows has recovered from a serious system error," almost never
> happens except with a hardware failure, and he said it's typically the hard
> drive, memory, or video card. (I of course have others with different
> opinions on that.)
>
> I've since replaced my memory. Still, the problem persists.
>
> I'm not running Error-Checking with Repair Bad Sectors yet, out of concern
> it "might" make matters worse if it is a "bad sector" issue.
>
> I've run a Norton Internet Security full-system scan and it found no
> malware. (Next I'm going to also try Spybot, but I'm not expecting this will
> prove to be the issue.)
>
> Does this sound like a hardware issue? Bad sectors on the hard drive, perhaps?
>
> Any other ideas what it might be?
>
> Thanks!

I've had similar problems but can't seem to drum out the source of the
reboots. When it does happen, it puts an entry into my System Event
Viewer. I've sent a trouble report to Microsoft but per their website,
it says it is a driver issue but they have no fixes available.