Classic Shell: Forum

I have had this issue for weeks now occurring on another user's machine. Windows 7, 32 Bit system, 4 Gigs of RAM.

Explorer.exe crashes without rhyme or reason.

When i first noticed the issue, i thought it was weird that her desktop icons and task bar never disappeared... just the folder window she had opened.

After weeks of uninstalling this and that... I finally noticed a second instance of Explorer.exe that only pops up when browsing folders. I googled everything I could think of, and finally came across the nifty Process Explorer. When i check the properties of the command line of the second explorer that keeps crashing, i see this:

c:\windows\explorer.exe /factory,{ceff45ee-c862-41de-aee2-a022c81eda92} -embedding

I searched that entire string, and learned that {ceff45ee-c862-41de-aee2-a022c81eda92} is actually a value in the registry. When I google that value itself, it led me to this very forum.

In regards to Classic Shell, one of the first things i did was disable the shell extensions to see if that would disable the second instance running every time a folder was open. Nothing changed.

I then went ahead and completely uninstalled classic shell. Nothing Changed. At all.

Is classic shell known for editing this registry value? How can I stop this second instance of explorer.exe from starting?

It is an Explorer setting named "Launch folder windows in a separate process".
However in my experience it makes Explorer crash less, not more.

That makes sense... I honestly can't say what for sure is causing the explorer.exe to crash, All of the error messages give me an unknown faulting module... I just know that it is only happening to this one instance of explore.exe and not the other.

Is it common for this setting to stick even after uninstalling Classic Shell? I am almost tempted to delete the registry entry just to see if it will at least stop the second instance.

This has nothing to do with Classic Shell. It is a Windows setting. It is supposed to stick.