SOLVED Explorer crashes and restarts

[julio99]

Whenever I go to the "Programs and Features" module in Win 7 I get the trusty old, "Explorer has stopped working and is restarting" my taskbar goes for a split second and P&F closes. I have gone to Event viewer to look for a reason and 9 out of 10 crashes acording to the faulting module is "msi.dll" Isn't msi the Microsoft installer? Anyway, how can I go about fixing this or troubleshooting it? It is to say the least annoying.
My Computer is an Acer laptop Win 7 HP x64/8gb RAM /Core i5 430Mprocessor.

 

[TrainableMan]

Perhaps try the Microsoft Fixit tool offered when you go >>HERE<< and see if that helps.

 

[julio99]

Perhaps try the Microsoft Fixit tool offered when you go >>HERE<< and see if that helps.

So far so good. It fixed some issues with "Windows Update" and Windows Update components. Those probably have msi.dll issues associated with them so that could be it. I'll try it intermittently tonight and see what happens, but as I said, so far so good. Once again Train to the rescue. Thanks man.

 

[TrainableMan]

You might also go to a command prompt and run the system file checker:
sfc /scannow

It might have been a bad update but if your files get corrupted on a regular basis it can be an indication your hard drive is going bad. So another good check is to run a Scandisk, in W7 you do that as shown HERE

 

[julio99]

I just ran an sfc /scannow not too long ago. Is there a time limit on when and how often you should run these? Also, what is the difference between chkdsk and sfc /scannow, or is there one?

 

[TrainableMan]

SFC is a system file checker and it actually verifies and repairs the system files on the hard drive. scandisk/chkdsk is looking for issues with the hard drive itself and is looking for bad sectors or incomplete files; it doesn't know what the files should be like sfc does but it is checking all files lengths, sector pointers, etc and is not limited to system files.

It doesn't hurt to run them whenever, it merely takes time. Unless you suspect a problem, once every 3 to 6 months is plenty.

 

[julio99]

Thanx. If for some reason it acts up again, I will run one or the other. Probably the sfc /scannow.

 

[TrainableMan]

I'm going to mark this as solved, if it returns we can open it again.

 

[julio99]

Actually, it's still good, so mark away. If something goes wrong I'll figure it out from our other solutions that we discussed. (sfc.........)