[SOLVED] Windows Explorer Keeps Crashing In XP SP3

Hi,

I am going to take a look at my girlfriends PC at some point over the weekend because she says its playing up. From what I gather windows explorer is crashing when she boots up. She is running windows XP with SP3. I am not quite sure what to do about it, as I have not really used windows in over 12 months (linux rocks). She also tells me that this error used to happen in SP2 as well.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where I could start checking for problems with her machine. I guess I could format the machine to solve the problem, but I would like to do this as a last resort.

Thanks for any help,

Ash R

P.S. Although I have suggested it, she is totally against the idea of me putting Ubuntu on her PC.

Well after 3 hours at it, I finally fixed it. In case anyone is interested, here is what I did:

1) Discovered that Norton Anti-Virus had run out 2) Installed AVG Anti-Virus 3) Ran a scan on the whole computer 4) Found 2 Trojans, a Worm and countless cookies. 5) Removed all the items listed above 6) Restarted the PC

This fixed Windows Explorer :p

I was then told Internet Explorer was also playing up. I had a look and discovered it wasn't loading any pages (I checked firefox and that works fine). Initially I thought it was because of security settings, but they looked okay. I then stumbled across the fact that it was Internet Explorer 6. I then downloaded Internet Explorer 7 and installed it. One restart later and that too now works. :p

-Ash R