Windows Explorer Crash

[Procyonarc]

Yesterday, I received an email from my teacher and at the bottom was a file attached named "winmail.dat" I thought it might have been something important so I downloaded the file to my desktop. However, after a minute or so, my Windows Explorer stopped responding and the dialogue box stated that "Windows Explorer is restarting." Soon about a minute later, the taskbar and all the icons reappeared again and it seemed to be all good. But then Windows Explorer stopped responding again and the cycle starts all over again.

I also tried to delete the file (didn't work) and my teacher sent the email via Outlook.

What my guess is happening (i'm not really sure at all) is that windows explorer is encountering an "unreadable" file and it fails to process it, so it stops working. Can anyone help me with this problem and tell me how to resolve this issue? Thank you!

 

[mscrx]

are you sure that your teacher sent this email? lots of worms spread this way and use address books of infected computers. they use names they find as fake sender. you should run a complete virus/spyware scan. best would be to use an alternative boot device such as ultimate boot cd for windows and run a scanner from there.

 

[kwspony]

Sure sounds like a bug to me. We have been getting a lot of them at my work. One of the tools that has been working good is the free version of MalwareBytes. Give it a try.