This is a schoolbook example of how to solve an annoying EXPLORER.EXE crash problem in just minutes. This guide can be used as inspiration for troubleshooting similar problems or for use with any application or process that crashes.

Problem

A user experienced a problem after upgrading Windows 10 version 1511 to 1607. Every time the user tried to open Windows File Explorer, it crashed, restarting the entire EXPLORER.EXE process. In the Application log in Event Viewer the following event was logged:

Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version 10.0.14393.479, time stamp 0x58258a90
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version 10.0.14393.479, time stamp 0x5825887f
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x00000000000f8283
Faulting process ID: 0x2428
Faulting application start time: 0x01d290d349d6a062
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report ID: cf2ee514-f280-4942-8225-4c7fb440f27b

Investigation

As the problem above does not really tell us anything useful we need to obtain more information on the problem. On the machine which have the problem, start by activating the creation of crash dump files to get the information you need by setting the following registry values:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps

Name: DumpFolder
Type: REG_SZ
Value: C:\CrashTemp

Name: DumpCount
Type: REG_DWORD (32-bit)
Value: 10

Name: DumpType
Type: REG_DWORD (32-bit)
Value: 2

Now reproduce the problem so that a crash dump is generated!

To analyze the problem we will be working with the Microsoft tool Windows Debugging Tools which can be downloaded for free from Microsoft (part of the Windows SDK), https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/windows-driver-kit (look for Get debugging Tools).

After installing Windows Debugging Tools, start it from the Start menu, it is called WinDbg (x86) or WinDbg (x64). To be able to get a result from the debugging of the DMP file and find the cause of the problem you will need the symbol files. These can be downloaded as one package but it is much more convenient to setup Windows Debugging Tools to download files as necessary. To set this up, in WinDbg, go to Open and choose Symbol file path. Now type a path to a directory on the hard drive, for example:

SRV*C:\symbolfiles*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Load and analyze the crash dump file
When the process crashes a snapshot of the memory is dumped to a file on the user’s computer.  This is the file that contains the key to the crash and to analyze it first open it by going to Open and then choosing Open Crash Dump. Before doing this copy the file to the machine where you will analyze this.

Browse to the location of the DMP file and choose to load it and if you get a question if you want to save the workspace you choose Yes. The necessary symbol files will now be downloaded from Microsoft. To get all the details about the crash you have to type:

!analyze -v

In this particular crash, we could instantly determine that the cause was thumbcache.dll.

Solution

As the problem was related to thumbnails cache, the first thing to try I thought was deleting the thumbnails cache. So I killed the explorer.exe process on the user’s machine and browsed to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer and deleted the thumbnails cache files which are located there. Voila, the user could then start File Explorer once again without experiencing a crash!