Two possibilities immediately jump to mind:
1. Maybe you haven't rebooted since installing? Some of the shell integration stuff doesn't take complete effect until you reboot.

2. (more likely) You have one of those nasty .SYS files installed (most often used by motherboard monitor/tweaker programs) that give programs direct access to the hardware, bypassing WinNT's protection/abstraction layers. These are known to cause conflicts with VDMSound and have to be uninstalled if you want to resolve the problem. There are lots of other threads about this (and I think maybe a FAQ or two) so you should do some searches.

Originally posted by Unregistered Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2800.1106, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.1.2600.1217, fault address 0x00007ec4.

Considering that DLL has been a "security issue", you might want to check to and see if you're fully up-to-date (with Windows Update) and also check the date on your Anti-Virus signatures.

Nope, none of the two candidate explanations below are applicable. 😀

Unregistered, when the crashes occur is there anything LaunchPad-related "in sight" (i.e. are you browsing a directory with LaunchPad shortcuts in it?) Also, do you have any development tools installed on your system via which you'd be able to obtain a stack trace of the fault (to see which other dll triggers the issue in ntdll?) Does uninstalling LaunchPad *period* fix the problem?

V.

HunterZ wrote:

Two possibilities immediately jump to mind:
1. Maybe you haven't rebooted since installing? Some of the shell integration stuff doesn't take complete effect until you reboot.

2. (more likely) You have one of those nasty .SYS files installed (most often used by motherboard monitor/tweaker programs) that give programs direct access to the hardware, bypassing WinNT's protection/abstraction layers. These are known to cause conflicts with VDMSound and have to be uninstalled if you want to resolve the problem. There are lots of other threads about this (and I think maybe a FAQ or two) so you should do some searches.

I have of course rebooted the machine many times. My computer is also up-to-date with Windows Update, firewall software, antivirus definitions and spyware removal.

I did find a solution to the problem, however. Microsoft has issued a patch Q329692_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe to fix it. It's intended only for users suffering of this specific problem and is therefore not listed on Windows Update. It took some time to come up with that, however.

It seems that the problem had something to do with Explorer drawing the icons of registered file types, though I'm not sure.

vladr, unfortunately I don't have any developement tools. To me it seemed that the problem could occur opening any folder. I suspected VDMSound, because I got the problem straight after installing it and do not remember making any other changes to the system at that time.

However, it's fixed and I'm happy 😁

Glad you found a solution. In case anyone else is having the same problem, I dug up a URL on Microsoft's site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?sci … b;en-us;Q329692

Originally posted by Unregistered I did find a solution to the problem, however. Microsoft has issued a patch Q329692_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe to fix it. It's intended only for users suffering of this specific problem and is therefore not listed on Windows Update. It took some time to come up with that, however.

You did a good job of finding that. That's an obscure bug I hadn't heard of before...