Using NT 4.0 w/SP6a and all the latest patches/hotfixes. When I boot up, explorer.exe is creating an error message of: An application error has occurred and an application error is being generated. explorer.exe Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address: 0x00401a89 Also, CDONTS doesn't work (though the SMTP server is started - but I can't control through the command line), and I can't open Internet Explorer. Replaced all RAM - just in case. No change. Found a couple of articles referencing this issue, but no positive result so far: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;170907 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;156366 Thanks for any assistance.

Can you remember what was done prior to this starting to happen? Or did it start after doing a visit to windowsupdate? Are there any entries in the event log that may help explain what is causing it? Do any services or programs in either the 'startup' folder on the start menu or those in:- HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run fail to load?

I too have received the same message. WIndows NT4 Service is fine then a windows update blows it up. I've seen this on two separate machines in less than a week. in one case (through repeated installs and uninstalls of IE and SP6a) I got IE6 installed but no browse. Netscape browsed just fine. none of the knowledge base articles seems to apply. MS no longer supports IE 5.5 Sp2 so after the IE 6 uninstall, it rolls back to 5.0 Some software requires higher IE builds and therefore I have a problem.

There are runours that fixes Q823980 & Q823803 cause problems. There are some other threads here mentioning them. Oddly enough though I recently did a windowsupdate on all my servers and they are running fine with IE 5.5 SP2 on them.

I installed Q823803 from WindowsUpdate and when I rebooted RAS crashed and Explorer crashed every time after just a few seconds. Sometimes it would stay up just long enough for me to launch a program from the taskbar. However I had no desktop icons at all and I could not use my browser. Microsoft has issued a warning as part of Q825501 which pertains to RAS but not to Explorer. I removed Q823803 but I still have the problem. I am still working on this..

I have the same problem under Windows 2000 after installing Q818529 update. Explorer.exe simply crashes, no error messages are shown. How can I manage to uninstall this update?

First of all, pardon me for the previous post. I'm newer here and didn't see it was a nt section. Anyway, I think I've solved the problem. It was caused due a bad dll: system32\shlwapi.dll. I found the same dll, but newer, under system32\dllcache\, and just overwrited the older with this one. I'm probing it, but explorer seem to work ok.