Just curious if anyone has experienced this. I attempted to download an excel attachment from an AOL 7.0 e-mail. Immediately received a "explorer.exe failed to initiate" error (0xc0000005). XP never did recover, even after system restore and F8 "last good configuration" attempted. Had to reinstall Windows XP. So much for the "most reliable Windows".

Aol 7 and windows XP aren't fully compatable yet. check the AOL website for news and patches.

I get this error with IE 6.x and Opera 6.01 too. In fact, those are not the only applications that give me this error. I have WinXP on four machines, and three of them (all different harware configurations) give me this error at different times and while operating different applications. I would suspect and error in the Win OS, and not the myriad of other applications that experience this issue. In the meantime dual boot, baby. That way when the frustration gets to be too much, one can always boot into some other OS for a productive day! Carl

Had this same problem on a clients machine but could not locate a fix anywhere. Closest I came was here: Although this fix does not specifically relate to the exact problem. It does work. Locate the shdocvw.dl_ file on the XP cd-rom (in the I386 directory) and replace the shdocvw.dll file in your system32 directory on your hard drive. The extract command does work though you're not exactly extracting the file from a .cab. Works perfectly after that. I guess somehow AOL corrupts this file, so you should probably install any AOL patches once you've got it working properly again.

Doh! Forgot the link: From the Microsoft Knowledge Base (Q175930): http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q175930