Just to be clear, explorer crashes because of bad encoding that affected the thumbnails view of the file. Turning off thumbnails would therefore stop the crashes. If your explorer is crashing because you are trying to play the file (as opposed to just viewing the files in a folder) than it's more likely you have a corrupt video file. Personally, just to ID the problem, I would undo your registry change and turn off thumbnails and then try play the file.

Hi All

First timer here. I have a problem with the same message stating that explorer has encoubtered a problem and needs to close.

However, this happens when I run "search" on the start menu. I will search for any keyword and as soon as it starts the process, it closes with that message. I get the same when I navigate to windows.

Does anybody know how I can fix this?

I had the same problem as most of you but i done this:

go to start -> run and type "regsvr32 /u vsfilter.dll" (without the quotes) and press enter. from Spike

then nothing happened except a message stating expired or something, i then went into my folder where the problem was it was still the same.

so i then tried the next option which was stated by Peddant

Go to Start/Run/and type - regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll click OK.

which this fixed the roblem

this information is to help those whom are still struggling

hi. im new here. i was just trying out the various methods u guys had mentioned about the avi file crashing and giving error msgs. I downloaded some videos from ares and some seem to work some just say ares or windows media player has encountered a problem and needs to close. I tried all you guys said and i stil have the same problem. is it a bad file or ??

I was having the same problem as described in this thread. All I was trying to do was rename an *.avi file (xvid movie); explorer would crash every time...(vsfilter.dll caused a problem and now explorer will close).

I used AVI Fixed to resolve the problem. Moreover, what was recommended before this thread worked out as well before I used AVI Fixed:
Go to Start/Run/and type - regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll click OK. It helped in renaming the file with no crashing with explorer but that is when I noticed the movie would not play.

Again, it was just one corrupt *.avi movie that was giving me an issue. Repairing the movie did the trick. I am sure that there are more apps out there like AVI Fixed.

Excellent job of diagnosing the problem withe the previous posts. Helped me out plenty.