Vista - Can't access the right click menu in my Pictures folder

Hello:

I am running Vista home premium on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop. Overall it
works very nice, and I have had no real problems, until now. As you know when
you right click on an item you get a menu that has options like sending the
file to a particular place, or renaming it, ect.... Up til just a little bit
ago this worked fine. All of a sudden when I right click on a file in my
picture folder I am told that Windows Explorer needs to turn itself off and
then it does so. Explorer will then restart itself again. It will only do
this with picture files. All other files work just fine when I right click
them.

This morning I was tagging (filling out descriptions of the pictures, number
of stars to give a particular picture - stuff like that.) I'm sorry but for
the life of me I'm not totally sure what program I was using, but I think it
was the basic picture program that came with my computer as a part of Windows.

I'm willing to admit that I might have clicked on something I should not
have, and I hope someone will read this and remember having the same problem
and then could tell me how they fixed it.

Thank you, in advance, for any help you can give me. I'm not new to
computers but I am very new to Vista!