i went to update windows xp with the automatic update when i restarted the pc to finish the installation explorer.exe crashed and the installation didnt finish now every time i turn the pc on explorer.exe crashes. if i do ctrl alt del it says that svhost.exe is using 95% of the cpu!!

When it crashes, press ctrl+alt+delete to bring up the task manager, click on File, click on New Task, type in EXPLORER.exe and click ok, that should bring back your desktop from where you can do more research (try running SFC /SCANNOW from the Start menu, that will repair all windows files).

Oh, and if you CAN get your desktop back, run a virus scan, make sure the definitions are fully up to date.

nope the scannow didnt find anything, the virus scan didnt find any thing and it is up to date i tryed system restore and that comes up with a message saying that it could not restore the data but i can get the computer to work like normal when i go to the processes tab in windows task manager and end the process of 2 svchost.exe that are running so i guess they are what is freezing my desktop up

I've had a similar problem. If I close explorer.exe in the task manager and then restart it, it will work for a while before it crashes again, but starting new programs (including explorer.exe) from the task manager does not always work when I have this problem and once explorer starts crashing it keeps on crashing. Closing a few of the svchost.exe processes seems to solve the problem. Any suggestions on how to identify which svchost.exe does what so that I can turn off the troublesome one in msconfig or services.msc?