Explorer as a Separate Process

There are some times when you will have the explorer.exe process crash for no given reason. It's seemingly due to poor use of resources by various applications. A common time to see this is when you open a disk with many compressed files on it. Regardless of the RAM on your system it seems that your Anti-Virus software slows down the system enough to prevent explorer.exe from responding in a timely fashion.

Here's one of the things that you can do to try to make that problem either happen less often or stop entirely. Basically what you will be doing is you will be loading the desktop as a separate instance of explorer.exe and this has often been the work around for this sort of problem in the past.

 Before attempting the following make sure you read and understand Registry Editing Warning.

Directions:

1. Press the Start button
2. Click on Run
3. Type regedit
4. Click OK
5. Dig down to:
   
   



6. Click Edit (at the top)
7. Select New > DWORD Value
8. Name it DesktopProcess
9. In the right hand pane double click the process and give it a value of 1
10. Click OK

The new key should appear like this:

Restart or logoff and log back on for the changes to take effect

Note:
Changing the registry and modifying values inside the registry can have unfavorable effects on your computer. For those reasons you should backup your registry before proceeding with any registry edits. However, there's nothing here that hasn't been tried nor is new and this shouldn't have any undesired effects with the exception of people with networked drives and that is often cured simply by using a different drive letter for each mapped drive.

OS: XP > Tips / Tweaks
Date: 06/07/05

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