I've been having this issue for several months and have already posted this issue several times in other sites, but no one seems to have an answer. This has me pulling my hair out and it is interrupting workflow horrifically. I would like to solve this, and I'm hoping someone can at least point me in the right direction. That said, I'm quite tech literate, and have researched as much as I can into this issue before posting, so I'm hoping that with some help this can get resolved. I've compiled all the details that are relevant to the issue, and organized them here.
Symptoms
In summary, explorer seems to crash randomly when accessing a directory to read/write data from files. This is pretty broad, but that's all I can gauge from it.
Crash Log
Event Viewer lists the issue as EventID 1000. Most of the time the faulting module is windows.storage.dll, and other times it is ntdll.dll or DUI70.dll. Here is an example of one of the error logs:
Faulting application name: explorer.exe, version: 10.0.14393.1532, time stamp: 0x5965adb0
Faulting module name: windows.storage.dll, version: 10.0.14393.2007, time stamp: 0x5a49bcac
Exception code: 0xc000041d
Fault offset: 0x00000000001c4b17
Faulting process id: 0x13f0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d38afd8291a0be
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\windows.storage.dll
I did enable crash dumps for explorer at some point, but was unable to understand any of the data it provided. Here's some statistics about my computer in case that matters:
Microsoft Windows 10 Home
10.0.16299 Build 16299
HP Pavilion Notebook
AMD Quad-Core A10-8700P APU
AMD Radeon R6 (Laptop version)
8GB RAM
Previously I was having this issue before the Creators update, but as you'll see below, updating to the latest version of Windows did not solve the issue.
EDIT Here is a Crash Dump provided by explorer.exe after I enabled CrashDumps through registry: Crash Dump
Potential Solutions
Here is a list of everything I have tried to fix this issue. Keep in mind that none of the things listed have seemed to solve it, the issue still occurred.
Here is a list of things I haven't tried that could fix the issue (but I'm hesitant to do because of their very nature).
Discussion
I've searched online for this issue and have found many, many articles of people having crashing problems. While some of them seem to be similar to mine, the details are actually quite different. And the fixes they have all given haven't worked as a result of that. For example, many people have issues where explorer.exe crashes on startup, but this isn't what I experience.
I have found one forum post which matches my problem exactly and you should check it out here. There are more logs and attempted fixes listed there, and the crash dumps and error warnings are all identical to what I'm experiencing. Yet there still wasn't a clear fix at the end of that post. It seems like creating a new user could solve the issue, but that still doesn't explain why the issue occurred in the first place. Additionally, it was hinted that the issue would return even after a new account was made.
I can see that my explorer.exe program was modified by the latest Windows 10 update, as the creation date has changed. Yet the issue persists. So even with a completely new explorer.exe, the issue is still happening.
What I understand
I don't believe any service or actively running third party program is at fault here. After all, I ran a Clean Boot AND Safe Mode boot, and the issue seemed to persist. Could this in fact be an issue with the program explorer.exe data itself? Or some obscure setting in the User data? It's also likely not the fault of file corruption or virus interference, as the sfc scan AND CheckHealth yielded no results. Also, the problem occurs on external disks, which means it's unlikely that hard drive is at fault. Additionally, memory leakage doesn't seem to be the issue either. Drivers were all disabled during Safe Mode, so I don't think any updates are at fault. Could it possible that a virus or driver update somehow modifed a .dll and then stopped running? Does sfc scan to see if Windows files are intact? Is there a way to check such a thing? Could my user profile be corrupted? I'm just throwing out ideas.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
After several months of searching for solutions, I finally found something that can mediate the problem. I searched specifically for the faulting modules and the function listed in the Crash Dump info and ended up at this link which suggested a fix at the bottom. Here's the fix:
It seems the issue resulted from some sort of error in adding an item to this recent list; hence why the crash occurs when creating a new folder or opening an item. One thing that hasn't been fixed is the "new window" part of the problem, but that's more of an inconvenience and I can work around that. At the very least, this seems to stop explorer from crashing... though I'm sure whatever the problem is it's still there, just mitigated by this setting. But that's good enough for me.
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