Vista: Explorer, Defender and other apps crashing [because of gdiplus.

[sinqe]

No idea why this started happening (Not really anything has been installed or changed in the last couple of days) but quite a few things are crashing, for example, explorer.exe crashes when opening images (Using the 'Preview' thing) or opening the Games window, Defender simply won't start, start++ won't start, Nvidia control panel crashes, etc.

Here is an example of Defender crashing:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:	APPCRASH
  Application Name:	MSASCui.exe
  Application Version:	1.1.1505.0
  Application Timestamp:	45ad82d9
  Fault Module Name:	gdiplus.dll
  Fault Module Version:	5.2.6000.16386
  Fault Module Timestamp:	4549bcaf
  Exception Code:	c0000005
  Exception Offset:	00032ad0
  OS Version:	6.0.6000.2.0.0.768.3
  Locale ID:	3081
  Additional Information 1:	8d13
  Additional Information 2:	cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311
  Additional Information 3:	8d13
  Additional Information 4:	cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311

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Each one of these error boxes from the various crashes mentions gdiplus.dll so I tried replacing the file with a 'fresh' copy, using regsvr to re-register it and just some other things but I haven't gotten anywhere.

I really need to fix this. :/

I don't know what details would be useful, just a rather standard Vista [32Bit/Home Premium] setup.

Edited June 1, 2007 by sinqe

[Woomera]

Read THIS

Then upload the dump file in a file hosting server like DepositFiles and provide the link here so maybe some of the experts here analyze the dump file for you.