Vista - Windows Explorer stopped / restarting loop

I just spent the last 4 hours on one of the toughest bugs, I ever had to figure out and thought I better share since most of the fixes I have recently heard about for this problem are pretty drastic. No doubt, it is a nasty bug and I can imagine it has several different "species".

So for me all of a sudden I got this Windows Explorer has stopped follower by another dialog wanting to restart. There are ways to "trick" the system into letting you do a few things but essentially the system is hosed. The last thing I was doing before this happened was moving files from portable drive to a new 1TB drive i had installed just for backups. This is a relativly new system I am still configuring. It has a swappable 5 drive bay and I have my OS on one of the swap able drives so I can do my music production on a pristine and tweeked vista 64 environment then swap that with my normal vista 32 environment for everything else. There are 2 500GB drives, a 300GB 10k drive the OS drives are the 160 GB 10k drives also.

Anyway, I'll get to the point, I fixed it by logging in as a different user, opening a CMD window and navigating to the desktop folder of the user ID that is having the problem. Then usin DOS commands you make several folders. then you move as many of the desktop files as you can to the folders, (splitting them up will help you identify where the problem lies) so I just moved groups of files
C:\users\Dad\Desktop> move *.mpg hold1
C:\users\Dad\Desktop> move *.rtf hold2

Then you have to move these folders another level deeper
C:\users\Dad\Desktop> move hold1 folderholder1
etc

Now logoff the good user and log into the corrupted user again, at this point you should not be experiencing the loop but if you open windows explorer, navigate to the desktop and select that folderholder1 the problem starts up again. For me the offending file is a .mpg file, not all .mpg files but some. if the file remnders to a nice image of the first frame of the movie everything is fine, if it looks like a generic icon the loop is triggered. You cannot navigate within 2 nested levels of the file because Vista renders those cool folder icons that actually have images of the files they contain.

I don't know what the REAL fix will be for me yet, I think I may need to uninstall and reinstall some utility that will update the MPG CODECs or something like that but at least I didn't have to do a full restore. So I can imagine this look ahead functionality Vista has applying to many different file types, mine was MPG but the same type of loop could be associated with any file type sitting on the desktop and will drive a person crazy trying to figure this out.

So anyway, to figure out which filetype is screwiung up your machine you look into one of those folders, when you do explorer will loop. Restart explorer you won't be in a loop anymore since the file is not on your desktop. Open a cmd window again and navigate to the offending folder, do a dir, you will probably have an idea which one is screwing things up, it is likely a new file, just rename the extension to something else:
C:\users\Dad\Desktop\folderholder1\hold1> rename *.mpg *.badmpg

then go into folderholder1 again with windows explorer if it doesn't loop go into hold1 if that doesn't loop you have identified the bad extension. if it is a .lnk then it is likely the program that the link points to etc.

I hope this information is useful to someone, when I was debugging this I saw many, many people with this problem and a lot of solutions but most of them involved restore points or nuking the system down to the bare metal. both will work, and maybe I just got lucky...

YMMV

Jim

Thanks for the explanation. You are right, this does seem to be a not uncommon problem. I have had it myself. In my case I knew which was the offending file and was able to delete it before Vista rendered the folder icon. It was the rendering that seemed to send explorer into a spin.