Windows 10 - explorer.exe crashes when I right click a file or a folder

Question

i've got a problem similar to the one listed in this post on Windows 10: File Explorer Crashing on Windows 10

Basically, everytime i right-click something, explorer crashes. What makes me upset is that this happened without a triggering event: no updates install, nor i've installed anything before it started crashing. It was completely randomic. I've made a dump file, using the instruction given on that post, is it normal that it's 500 MB big? Uploading such a huge file could be an issue for my poor internet connection.

I'm trying to fix this from at least 2 hours, didn't manage to do that. I don't know how to read these dump files.

Thank you for any help you can give me. This issue is making me crazy :s

Solution

Most problems such as you describe are caused by bugs in "shell extensions". These are plug-ins to Explorer that provide all the stuff you see in the context menu that right-click gives you. Without looking at the dump it's impossible to say which one is at fault (or even if this is the problem), but you might look at the "Shell Extensions Manager", a free tool from NirSoft. Run it and try disabling extensions until the problem goes away.

If you have a lot of extensions, a "divide and conquer" approach may help. For example, you could start by disabling all non-Microsoft extensions.

Or you can use a classic "binary search". Start by disabling half of the extensions. If the problem doesn't go away, re-enable those and disable the others. Assuming that the problem goes away with one of those groups, now divide that group in half and repeat. In this way you can narrow the suspect field very quickly. e.g. if you had 64 extensions, this gets you down to just one in just six "divisions".

Comments

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Just FYI, dump files compress (zip) really well. Post the zip'd version instead. You examine them with a debugger like Visual Studio or WinDbg.

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Most problems such as you describe are caused by bugs in "shell extensions". These are plug-ins to Explorer that provide all the stuff you see in the context menu that right-click gives you. Without looking at the dump it's impossible to say which one is at fault (or even if this is the problem), but you might look at the "Shell Extensions Manager", a free tool from NirSoft. Run it and try disabling extensions until the problem goes away. nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Another troubleshooting tactic is to create another user account - if the problem doesn't exist there it's something that was installed under your user profile.

[Ricky]

Thank you so much, I knew Nirsoft for their bluescreenviewer (those guys are awesome), but I missed to check if they had anything about shell extensions (now i know how the "right click menu extension" are properly called, the more you know!"). Probably after hours of googling trying to fix it my madness fuzzled my brain :D Thanks to Shell Extension Manager (and you help of course) i've isolated the issue and fixed it. Can be marked as solved. Don't know how to upvote your comment, if I knew i would upvote it one thousand times. Sorry for the tag error too on the OP, i'm new around here =)

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Ok, good. I have posted the above as an answer (with some additions) - please mark it as Approved. Thank you!

[MSM]

In my case, I figured out after 3 years that it was actually 'format factory' context menu extension that used to cause the problem.