Windows Image and Fax Viewer in Seperate Explorer.exe

[neowillendit]

Hello fellow MSFN Brothers,

I've been having explorer.exe crashes lately when opening JPG images (I'm sure that I don't have Viruses/Spyware/Malware). So, I've been hunting Google to try to find out how to seperate the Windows Image and Fax Viewer explorer.exe process to a seperate explorer.exe, via some kind of registry hack and can't find one. Does anyone else happen to know how or if I can at all? Thank you in advance!!

[neowillendit]

Could anyone please comment on this? Any responses are welcome and VERY appreciated!!

[JedMeister]

If I were you I'd be trying to find the cause of the problem first and then try to find some workaround if you have no success with that.

If you want to troubleshoot the cause you will need to get a memory dump from when explorer crashes and upload it and get one of the very knowledgeable guys on here (not me!) to examine it for you. There are detailed instructions on here somewhere on how to do that, have a search and you should find it. Another good step would be to change the heading (if you can) to something like "JPG crashes explorer.exe". You could try just disabling startup programs that hook into the shell (using something like Autoruns) to see if an installed program is causing the crash (my suspicion). Using trial and error you may be able to locate the problem app (if thats what it is).

On the other hand if you want to persevere with a workaround without trying to find the cause, I know there is a reg hack to open a new instance of explorer.exe each time but I don't know if that'd work. Perhaps you could just associate .jpg's with another program?

Even though you say you don't think its caused by malware have you done a rootkit scan, got a second opinion using a free online AV scanner and done a thorough scan with a couple of different spyware scanners?