Windows Explorer has stopped working

I get the message 'windows explorer has stopped working' every time I open chrome. I have extensions scriptsafe, wot, traffic light, adblock. I chose sync in scriptsafe and it syncs chrome in my admin and std account. I uninstalled chrome and reinstalled it fresh, but the popup came back. I then tried FF fresh from Mozilla with no extensions and the popup appeared whenever I opened it. I can open and close other apps without the error message appearing. This only happens in the std account. It has never happened in the admin account.

I tied this: Ran a scan under command prompt and no problems found. Also checked the reliability history, tech details and the failing module is RIShellExt.dll in windows/system32. Checked MS answers forum and there are pages and pages on 'windows explorer has stopped working' with suggestions that range from a clean reinstall of the OS to registry changes.

Does a browser call on windows explorer for any reason? Is the sync operation calling on it? I do not know what to do.

 

If you have too many windows open, Windows Explorer can stop working and you have to reload it. If you run out of physical memory, time for a reboot.

 

as you say that admin account is ok try creating another std account to see if the current std is corrupt somehow

 

It may be worth running Tweaking.com's Windows Repair. Even if it doesn't fix your problem, it should not do any harm to your system.

 

Thank you Cudni. I have opened a new std account and have had no problems with opening and closing FF or Chrome so far, however I have not tried the sync step on Chrome yet. I will try that in a few days.

Also, Thank you roger m, I have downloaded the program and run all the steps. I opened the log and it was empty, so I do not know if anything got fixed. I ran it from my admin account.

 

If I ran all the steps it should have worked - but you do no reboot before all the changes come into effect.

Did it make any difference to your problem?

 

I did reboot. Since yesterday (in the std account where the problem occurs), I have opened Chrome several times and there has been no popup. Also, the same for FF. Chrome is my default browser. I also have a test std account running and it is OK right now. These browsers are both sandboxed with BZPro (all default settings). This morning I opened FF outside the sandbox on both std accounts and the popup came. The same for Chrome. I had not tried this test before as I only do this on my admin account and have never had the problem. I run sandboxed by default and only go outside to install extensions.

 

As the problem kept on happening with the my browsers sandboxed I uninstalled and removed the sandbox product BZ and have noticed that the popup 'windows explorer has stopped working' has not happened again on the std and test std account. It has been 4 days now. I synced Chrome and all is good. Maybe there are some settings or restrictions that are not obvious to me. The system is good now so I will leave it this way.