i'm running vista home premium amd64 SP2

and windows explorer crashes when i right click on files, or try to open things like device manager or the error report console. i have also noticed that a simple reboot will resolve this for a little while, but after running the computer for an hour or two the problem is back. i did a little reading into the shell extensions, but i'm not sure that this is the cause, because the only think that i installed with a shell extension was avast anti-virus and that was years ago (it would seem odd that it would just start now)

any ideas, or would it have to be a shell extension causing the error?

thanks.

Might be wise to get an application crash dump of explorer.exe the next time it crashes.