Explorer crash loop

[klippenwald]

Has anyone experienced this? Does anyone know how to fix it?

It used to be that right-clicking on anything on the desktop or in file explorer would cause crash loop of explorer.exe, but it was inconsistent. Now it crashes immediately on windows login. it loops for about 15 seconds, then stops working altogether and cannot be restarted (well, mostly, but it just goes right back into a crash loop again). This is causing many of my other programs to work improperly as well. I.e. task manager will not fully close. Programs open in the background and cannot be alt-tabbed to, you have to open task manager and select "bring to front".

That's my question... anybody know what the issue is? Win10 upgraded from Win 7, all the latest updates as of today.

 

[viveknayyar007]

Hello klippenwald

It looks like the EXPLORER.EXE file in your copy of Windows got corrupted. Even though you can manually replace all the instances of the file with another copy of the same file from any other Windows 10 computer, the simple and best way would be to Restore Windows 10 to an Earlier Restore Point, i.e. when you believe the computer worked fine - may be to 30 days earlier or so.

Let me know if this works, and feel free to reply if further assistance is needed.

Cheers!!

 

[soporifics]

This sounds like a manufacturer sound audio issue for some of us. I found this solution and it worked for me. I found some error in the Events Manager and this one was relevant "IDTNC64.cpl." "The root cause of the problem is that the audio software supplied by IDT and used by several PC manufacturers (Dell, HP and probably others) is not compatible with Windows 10. IDTNC64.CPL is one component of that software and the correct solution is to uninstall the IDT audio altogether. Provided you have just restarted your PC, you should be able to use a Windows Run Box (Win Key + R) before the crashes get too serious. Type 'control panel' into the run box prompt and when the Control Panel appears, use Uninstall to seek out the offending IDT program - on my PC it had an icon of a musical note with the letters IDT next to it - and Uninstall. On rebooting the PC (use Ctrl-Alt-Del to power down if necessary) and restarting, Windows will automatically detect any missing audio drivers and install appropriate ones (not from IDT). You can then check that IDTNC64.CPL is no longer present in C:\windows\system32. If you have not yet migrated from an earlier version of Windows, it is best to Uninstall the IDT software in the old operating system (again, Windows will automatically reinstall compatible drivers) before attempting the upgrade to Windows 10." After days of troubleshooting, I finally have no desktop or file explorer loop crashes! Thanks (Mikedt10 !)

 

[claytonmd]

Before you do anything drastic. I had a similar issue caused by a .dll fault. Your best bet is to check the application error logs in Event Viewer. Reaching the logs was a difficult task as I was unable to do anything until i launched task manager and ended process by right clicking 'explorer.exe' from process tab. At this point you're stuck without a GUI. If you have this same issue you will need to launch task manager and then launch explorer.exe specifically from 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\explorer.exe' by clicking the Application tab and then clicking the 'New Task' button. From that instance of explorer you can search for the error logs in 'C:\Windows\System32\eventvwr.exe' from there you'll need to expand 'Windows Logs > Application' and then search for 'Error' in the 'level' column.

You may find an error similar to this:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version: 6.1.7601.17567, time stamp: 0x4d672ee4
Faulting module name: vtkFiltering.dll, version: 5.21.0.1, time stamp: 0x4e1d3238
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000ca21b
Faulting process id: 0x2b98
Faulting application start time: 0x01d12e83f4739b46
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE
Faulting module path: E:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2015\Moldflow\bin\vtkFiltering.dll
Report Id: 33794dae-9a77-11e5-b1f3-e006e6b835a2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From here you'll need to locate and alter the offending file in the explorer that you launched from C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ . In my case i altered 'vtkFiltering.dll' and changed it to 'vtkFiltering.dllX' and restarted. It was worth the effort not to restore and i haven't encountered an issue since even when launching Inventor.

Hope this will help someone.

 

[kfarnish]

Simple solution, providing you are happy to lose some fine control of the sound driver. You'll need to do with quick, before explorer.exe resets...

1) Navigate to c:\windows\system32
2) Search for IDTNC64.cpl
3) Right-click "rename" - you will need to apply admin permissions - and add .bak to the file name
4) Rejoice!

N.B. Removing the IDT application doesn't remove this module, so the error will continue if you do just that.

 

[klippenwald]

The solution was Apple's services. After a lot of searching I had to boot to safe mode, disable all non-necessary services and processes {clean boot} and turn them on one at a time.

iTunes and Apple services were the culprit. Disabled them or made them manual to start and everything worked correctly.

I have NO idea why I'm having this trouble, but at least I was able to get my system back to normal.

 

[David_442]

This sounds like a manufacturer sound audio issue for some of us. I found this solution and it worked for me. I found some error in the Events Manager and this one was relevant "IDTNC64.cpl." "The root cause of the problem is that the audio software supplied by IDT and used by several PC manufacturers (Dell, HP and probably others) is not compatible with Windows 10. IDTNC64.CPL is one component of that software and the correct solution is to uninstall the IDT audio altogether. Provided you have just restarted your PC, you should be able to use a Windows Run Box (Win Key + R) before the crashes get too serious. Type 'control panel' into the run box prompt and when the Control Panel appears, use Uninstall to seek out the offending IDT program - on my PC it had an icon of a musical note with the letters IDT next to it - and Uninstall. On rebooting the PC (use Ctrl-Alt-Del to power down if necessary) and restarting, Windows will automatically detect any missing audio drivers and install appropriate ones (not from IDT). You can then check that IDTNC64.CPL is no longer present in C:\windows\system32. If you have not yet migrated from an earlier version of Windows, it is best to Uninstall the IDT software in the old operating system (again, Windows will automatically reinstall compatible drivers) before attempting the upgrade to Windows 10." After days of troubleshooting, I finally have no desktop or file explorer loop crashes! Thanks (Mikedt10 !)

This method worked for me also. I spent days looking for a solution on MS support sites, nothing. I read the event log then searched online for IDTNC64.cpl and in one browse found the answer. Thank you

 

[Moondoggy]

I just wanted to add some input to this posting.

After upgrading my HP Pavilion DV7 Laptop to Windows 10 Spring Creators edition (Version 1703) I found that when I tried to open Control Panel the application would open and display the applets but you could not select any applet and the desktop appeared to be frozen. After about 30 seconds or so Control Panel closed and I retained control over my desktop. A check of the event log showed and Application Error Event 1000 that indicated that the IDTNC64.CPL was the failing module. To resolve this problem I acquired the latest Audio update driver install program from HP. Although this driver was for a Windows 7, 64-bit PC installing this driver fixed my problem and Control Panel was accessible after a restart. Note that at that time I thought that this problem was due to the fact that HP's update program never tagged this driver as one that needed updating even while it was still Windows 7.

After installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (Version 1709) I found that once again I was having the same issue as before and as before I reinstalled the same Windows 7 driver I had previously downloaded and it again fixed my problem with Control Panel. My conclusion is that perhaps the problem I had with the spring upgrade was not an old driver but that the Upgrade program caused the problem. Anyway, if you are having an issue with this Audio driver my recommendation would be to contact support for your PC and have them send you the most current audio driver setup program they have for this particular driver. I recommend this as today when I tried to find the driver thru HP's website they no longer provided me a list of drivers for my PC even though I was telling them that it was still Windows 7. My guess is that they don't even want you attempting to install an older driver so they're not listing them as being available but I'm sure that if you call them and speak to a support tech they can send you the most current driver. Fortunately for me I still had the unzipped driver install directory on my PC and I was able to run the setup program that made things better.