Windows 7 - Explorer.exe keeps crashing

24. November 2009 by Myke.

This post contains information on how to edit and modify your Windows Registry.  It is always recommended that you take a backup of the Registry before editing any of the values because any improper editing can cause strange behaviour and at worst could even corrupt your operating system completely, requiring you to re-install Windows.

We encourage you to try out the registry changes,  but only if you know what you are doing and if you do it with care.

After building a brand new Windows 7 ENT x64 laptop I ran into some issues.  The issues started shortly after finishing some updates.  Explorer.exe kept crashing every time I would right-click on an icon or try to use anything that used explorer.exe.  After searching the web for hours I found nothing that actually resolved the issue.  Pretty much everything out there pointed to doing a full restore or a clean installation.  I also found a couple posts that said once they deleted their profile and rebuilt it, everything worked.  Each of these is true but why waste the time and effort.  I am not sure about you but hearing from a Microsoft employee and having them tell you to do a clean install because it is hardware related or due to 3rd party software is getting real old.  Well you are in luck folks, because I have a solution that does not harm the machine and it can be done within 2 minutes.

Here is the error we were getting in our event logs;
The program Explorer.EXE version 6.1.7600.16404 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Action Center control panel.
Process ID: 810
Start Time: 01ca6d1f1aca747c
Termination Time: 0
Application Path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE
Report Id: 3fe9620d-d913-11de-8a55-00242cbe9d84

I ran every application I had that would point me in a direction of figuring out what was causing it and found nothing.  I decided to go through the 34 updates I had applied the day before and found an issue finally.  One of the updates was forcing the CEIP to execute.  *Dear Microsoft, why place something like this in an OS when you know it causes problems?*

The cause of the Windows Explorer crash is related to the SQM Client, which is part of the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). Under the default setting, where MachineThrottling is enabled in the registry, any calls to WinSqmStartSession in ntdll.dll file will cause Explorer to crash, or Windows Installer installation to fail.

So instead of waiting for a hotfix or an update from Microsoft, just remove and delete the MachineThrottling registry entry from system registry. The MachineThrottling registry entry is located inside the following registry key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions

*NOTE*  If you do not know what you are doing within the registry, stop and do not proceed.  Ask someone for help that knows what they are doing and can recover your registry if a failure occurs.

To make it easy you can just create your own little batch file with the following command;
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /v MachineThrottling /f

At this point you can close the registry and right-click on your file or icon and you should be good to go.

posted by: Myke Reinhold

Posted in Scripting, Registry, Microsoft, Desktops, Laptops | 10 Comments »