Solution For Crashing Windows Explorer And Windows Update In Windows 7
Have you ever experienced halts, crashes, errors while installing or uninstalling any software using Windows Installer or Explorer?
Installing or uninstalling applications using MSI’s executable or an .EXE called as msiexec.exe, initiating Windows updater, Microsoft Updater in Win 7 sometimes results in the installer getting crashed or generates errors.
A windows installer tends to crash, stops executing, hangs, and halts the entire installation process. It returns errors or notifications such as “windows explorer has stopped working” and “windows installer has stopped working” in a dialog box. In such cases the entire installation fails.
Later this notification still continues in the same dialog box suggesting that windows is looking for an answer to this problem or windows is accumulating more data for the same problem. This will take few minutes to complete.
It later asks a user if they wish to send extra information regarding this problem to Microsoft. After the details are filled in, a user can send this information to Microsoft by clicking the send information button. This facility is not available with Windows XP, Vista operating systems and they cannot resolve the above issues.
An error log is recorded each time in the event viewer which has the following details provided below:
Faulty Application’s name: Explorer. Exe, Version: 6.1.7000.0, Time Stamp: 0x49431f06
Faulty Module’s Name: Explorer. Exe, Version: 6.1.7000.0, Time Stamp: 0x49433e67
Exception Cipher/ Code: 0xc0000005 or 0xc015000f
Faulty Offset: 0x0007f6d6
Faulty Process Id: 0x56c
Faulty Application Initiation Time: 0x01c97968a23fc032
Faulty Application Path: C:\Windows\Explorer.Exe
Faulty Module’s Path: C:\Windows\System32\ntdll.dll
Report ID: f314a30c-e55b-11dd-83d9-001e375c9a5c
The very reason for Windows explorer’s crashing and failure of MSI is due to the SQM’s Client. This is also a portion of the CEIP, or the customer experience improvement program. Under its default settings, an option called as MachineThrottling is set. This is a registry setting and all calls to WinSqmStartSession are found in the ntdll.dll, which causes the explorer to crash. It is also the very reason for failed windows installer.
If you are tired of waiting for a fix for this problem from Microsoft, you can quickly try to fix it on your own by following a hack. One can remove or delete MachineThrottling settings from the registry. This setting in the registry can be found in the following key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions
One can also download Win7-Explorer-Fix.zip, unpack the zipped file. Now run Win7-Explorer-Fix.cmd to delete this key from the registry automatically.
If the above solution does not solve your problem, then one can disable windows CEIP. The method to disable customer experience improvement program is to open first the Local Group Policy editor called gpedit.msc, click on computer configuration, select administrative templates, select system option, select internet communication management option, and now select internet communication settings option.
From the details window pane, turn off windows customer experience improvement program by double clicking it and clicking the radio button called enabled.
No feature is lost if one disables the windows customer experience improvement program. This facility is utilized in sending any unknown information only to improve the operating system.