vista ultimate - explorer.exe crashing, continuous cycle hey guys, i'm using windows vista ultimate edition (OEM). been stable since i first installed it in march.
today i started getting this problem. explorer.exe crashed, it restarts itself, then crashes again, and continues doing this until i manually end the process.
i have no idea what happened?
i've done
sfc /scannow in cmd, and it didn't find any errors. ran spybot and didn't find anything. i run nod32 antivirus with updated definitions, and it didn't pick up any viruses before this problem started happening.
i formatted the C drive, started reinstalling my programs again, and the problem started occuring again. (msn, winamp, nvidia drivers, skype, nothing shady..).
installed windows xp pro sp2 on another ha
rd drive, and installed nod32 with updated definitions, and scanned the other hard drive (with vista on it, and my data partitions) and no viruses were found. Installing AVG to see if it can pick up any viruses.
any help guys?
my computer specs are:
CPU opteron 165
RAM Gskill 2GBHZ 2x1gb
Motherboard DFI LP UT Ultra-D
Graphics Card 256mb Gainward 7900GS Golden Sample
Audio X-Fi XtremeMusic
Power Supply Antec TPII 480W
EDIT: the problem still persists in safe mode which leads me to believe the problem is not software/driver related. i'll unplug my hardware one at a time to see if it fixes the problem
EDIT: doesn't seem like hardware is an issue. test my ram to see if it was faulty with memtest86+ and no errors came up for 5 passes. my guess is something corrupted a windows file. so how do i go about restoring windows files? thanks