[SOLVED] Windows Explorer has stopped working

A couple of days ago, I began to notice that something was wrong. My flash drives would not release, with a notice that it was being in use by a program. This morning, I removed VM Ware Player, and tried using Glary Utilities to find the virtual HDD to remove. After scanning for it, the program crashed and reported that Windows Explorer isn't working. Now, this didn't happen because I installed & removed VM Ware Player, as this was all done last night. The reason that I removed it was because it had a lot of overhead, and was pegging my CPU. The issue had to have begun prior to my flash drive removal issue, which by chance began Friday, to the best of my memory. Right now, I'm running "chkdsk /r", but that's taking a while (over 460GB to scan). Are there any simple answers as to why this service quits? I do have recent backups, but will resort to that as a last resort. If chkdsk /r doesn't fix things. my next option will be resorting to a restore point. Or would it be best to go to the option "Last Known Good Configuration at startup? Thanks for all answers. Cat

I've ran chkdsk /r with no results, used System Restore. I started System Restore prior to jumping in the shower, when I got back, it had booted into Mint, now it's doing a very extended disk check. So far, it has been running at least 40 minutes. This is a 1TB HDD, I just wished that it would finish.

So until I can reboot into 7, I won't know anything. Prior to going into System Restore, I attempted to run sfc /scannow, but the system would not allow me to, citing admin privileges are needed.

That will be my next thing to try, if System Restore doesn't work. I have some disk images made with both Acronis & Macrium, when the install was fresh, really I have no very important data on it, most of that is already on flash drives & DVD's.

If I do need to rely on the backup. I want to change some things, like create a data partition. Hopefully, I won't need a fresh install for this, as my recovery discs does not give the options for partitioning, the way that Linux OS's do at the time of install.

Hopefully, I won't have to go that far back. I'll patiently await Mint to get through with what's appearing to be a very long disk check.

Cat

I'm closing this thread and creating another.

Cat