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  1. A little backstory

    I installed a day ago some corrupted software into my computer and soon after that I got the "black screen of death" on boot. I reinstalled my windows, erasing all partitions except one where I had some personal content, nothing related to windows or software.

  2. The problem

    It all works perfectly now, except that, sometimes when I click "My Computer", the window freezes and I get the message: "Windows Explorer stopped responding".I am able to close windows.explorer after around 10 seconds, then it all works fine again, windows.explorer reloading itself after I close it. When the windows.explorer freezes, the my computer main page(the one that shows the partitions) is the ONLY one that does not respond, everything else working perfectly.

  3. More details

    Note: this happens in about 50% of the cases, not everytime. PLEASE prompt me if you feel the need for more details, I just want to make it work. Also,I now have an antivirus and I ran 2 full in depth scans, finding just 2 malwares and erasing them on the first scan.

  4. Full error details

A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature: Problem Event Name: AppHangB1 Application Name: explorer.exe Application Version: 6.1.7600.16385 Application Timestamp: 4a5bc60d Hang Signature: f128 Hang Type: 0 OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Hang Signature 1: f128b6859529d468288b0b438227f2a0 Additional Hang Signature 2: 038d Additional Hang Signature 3: 038dcc82876a0b81ae2e055408dbff7a Additional Hang Signature 4: f128 Additional Hang Signature 5: f128b6859529d468288b0b438227f2a0 Additional Hang Signature 6: 038d Additional Hang Signature 7: 038dcc82876a0b81ae2e055408dbff7a

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Roebrtb4
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1 Answers1

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To understand why the process is in a hung state you would need to analyze the threads of the process.

Two ways spring to mind. One is quick and could give you the answer, the other is more precise.

  1. Run Process Explorer, look at the threads of the Explorer.exe process. With Symbols configured, hopefully the call stacks of the threads suggest what the process is doing. You can see here which threads are consuming the most CPU time and could be responsible.

    1. The more precise/professional way. Create a memory dump of the Explorer.exe process when it has hung and then analyse it. Most likely you will want all of the process memory when it is in the hung state. To do so, I would suggest download Procdump (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx), then in an administrative command prompt run:

procdump -h -ma explorer.exe explorer.dmp

Next time the Explore.exe process hangs, hopefully Procdump will create you a dump file to analyze. The steps then would be to install Windbg which is part of the SDK - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/windows-10-sdk. Just the Debugging Tools for Windows component will need to be installed.

Once installed, launch Windbg and configure symbols. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff558829(v=vs.85).aspx

Then you can load the dump and run: !analyze -hang -v

This might get you the answer as to which thread/module could be causing the issue. Maybe it points to a thread with a third-party dll on the stack that you could remove.

Generally hangs are a little more tricky than crashes as you haven't really got an error, you just have to consider what the threads are doing in context of what is going on. Commands such as: !runaway will give you a list of threads by consumed CPU and could be a start. I would look through each of the stacks to see if they are performing work and what modules are involved, especially if they are 3rd party, i.e. not Microsoft.

For more information on this topic see: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-172-Application-Hangs

HelpingHand
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