Windows explorer error - ntdll.dll HELP!!

[Grimmwor]

I am getting the following error when moving files around on my hard drive, particularly when I move items (drag and drop) on my start menu. I have Windows XP SP1. I use Norton Internet Security 2003, and keep both patched and up to date. I have not had any viruses. The problem seemed to start sometime after I installed the ntdll buffer overflow vulnerability patch and installed Norton Internet Security 2003 (I had NIS 2002 all last year; I uninstalled and upgraded to 2003).

I get the following error message in a pop-up dialog box:

"Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Here are the error details:

Error Signature
AppName: explorer.exe
ModVer: 5.1.2600.1217
AppVer: 6.0.2800.1221
Offset: 00007ec4
ModName: ntdll.dll

An important thing to note: I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Sound card. When this problem occurs, the Creative Volume Control and Creative MediaSource Go! icons in my system tray disappear (but not any of the other icons in my system tray), and then the screen goes blank for a moment (even the Windows task bar and start button disappear for a moment), and then everything comes back and seems to be OK (except for the Creative system tray objects).

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling sound blaster drivers and utilities. Uninstalling and reinstalling NIS. Reapplying the windows ntdll patch. It has been suggested to me that I should perform a Repair Installation, but you know what, I do not accept that as a viable fix to any problem. It is absolutely absured (IMHP) to completely reinstall an OS to correct an error message. I guess because I am a programmer, I think like a programmer. There is a bug somewhere; we need to find it and correct it, not shoot it with a shotgun.

Anyway, any help/ideas/suggestions/thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Just reply to this post and I'll get an email. I have conducted an exhaustive search on the internet, and there are other people with this exact same problem and error message (same offset), so I know I am not the other one. The only solution I've been able to find so far is to do a repair install. That's bullcrap.

[LooseChippings]

The only solution I've been able to find so far is to do a repair install. That's bullcrap.

You might spend days or even weeks trying to find an answer to your problem or you could spend an hour or so and do an OS Repair.

It is quite likely that the repair will fix the problem.

Your Choice.

XP Repair - Many thanks to the Elder Geek

[Daeymon]

bad hard drive?

[Grimmwor]

Daeymon,

I thank-you for the suggestion and for taking the time to reply; a hardware problem is not something that I had considered; perhaps I should. I seem to remember my Western Digital Hard Drive came with some utility or software that allows you to run a diagnostic; I will give that a go, but I really believe this to be a software problem.

I think there is some kind of contention with the Creative Sound Blaster Audigy startup services running on my machine and how they access the ntdll.dll library. The problem is very reproducable. For example, if I move something on my Start menu by dragging and dropping, I get the error every time. It doesn't make my machine freeze or crash, it just pops up a dialog box and then hangs for a second while ending the explorer.exe process. If I just click on My Computer, or Search, explorer.exe launches again and everything is dandy. I have done some experimenting, mostly based on a hunch, and discovered that if I disable the three Creative Sound Blaster startup services that load when I boot up, the problem seems to go away. If I start one or more of the services by launching one of the Creative applications (such as MediaSource Go!), the problem once again rears it's ugly head. These are the specific services I am referring to:

AHQInit.exe
CTDVDDet.exe
CTSysVol.exe

I have a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card. It is not new hardware. It's been in my PC since I built it last year. Like I stated above, this problem seemed to start after I installed the ntdll.dll patch from micro$oft and upgraded to Norton Internet Security 2003 (both within a couple days of each other).

I've searched the Creative knowledge base to no avail.

Well, thanks again for the thought. I'm off to run a hard drive diagnostic. I will let you know if anything comes of it.

PS - LooseChippings,
I can appreciate your objective approach at handling this problem, but I think it would be really nice if I could find a solution or at least the cause of the problem so other folks experiencing the same error won't have to go through this same exercise. I consider a repair install a last resort fix, otherwise, what would be the point of forums like this one? Why not just have a web page that just says: "Reboot. If that doesn't work, reinstall Windows. Good Luck." I have spent a great deal of time customizing many aspects of my windows gui and sound scheme, have a nice, neat, perfectly organized start menu with everything just the way I like it. I have many custom icons and settings, the list goes on. With a repair install, this will all be lost. Customizing things the way I like also took the 'days or even weeks' that you referred to in your post. I would hate to have to start over from scratch with all of that for what is so far just a minor annoyance. And frankly, I am not 100% confident that it will even solve my problem. I read another post somewhere from a poor soul having the same error; he claimed that he did a repair install and it did not resolve the problem. I think that it is unfortunate that Microsoft has such a monopoly on the OS market that reinstalling has become a widely accepted fix for many minor problems (which are in fact bugs and defects). Let me ask you this: how would you feel if you took the Jag in to see the mechanic because the engine was making a clicking sound, and he told you that replacing the engine would make the sound go away? I kind of see this in that same light. It seems pretty drastic. Something is causing the error to occur. I will find it and fix it. I make my living as a programmer (ABAP - SAP R/3). If I suggested to one of my companies clients that reinstalling the application is the best way to fix their bugs, I would likely lose my job...of course our product does not have a monopoly, so we actually have to make it work to get paid. 'nuff said

[Grimmwor]

I just finished an extended diagnostic of my hard drive and found no problems. I am glad that I can rule that out as a possible problem!

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WDC WD800JB-00CRA1
Serial Number: WD-WMA8E3427869
Firmware Number: 710.W771
Drive Type: IDE
Port Number: 0, Primary/Master
Capacity: 78.15 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: PASS
Test Time: 20:10:55, September 03, 2003

[LooseChippings]

Grimmwor

Thankyou for the reply, I will now give you my reasons for giving it.

As you will know Troubleshooting is mostly a matter of intuition, using any type of telecommunications system only adds to the problem along with time zone differences and language barriers.

The vast majority of people who post on here are not experts in the art of PC and Software maintenance.

They want to get rid of a problem the simplest, quickest and cheapest way possible.

The use of the OS Repair is normally a last resort, you have gone through the normal steps - what is left to do?

Follow FREE advice on here or pay $20 an hour in the computer store, for most people there is no choice.

I (We) only suggest the use of tools that are readily available to the poster

We would all love the day when someone can teleport their machine to us for in depth troubleshooting but until then it is us or the local computer store.

Just because your problem happened in Windows does not mean that it is 100% a Microsoft problem, it could be a piece of software written by a third party company such as yours that has got it wrong.

As for you anology with the Jaguar car and the mechanic; I'm afraid it wouldn't happen. It a British car

[Grimmwor]

Touche, good sir!

Mr. Chippings,

I know that Jaguar is a British car; I chose it for my analogy thoughtfully and carefully...and all in good fun. I did see from your sidebar profile that you are from England.

In any case, I sincerely appreciate your replies and advice and hope it will keep coming in the future.

I readily acknowledge that the problem may very well be with the Creative drivers and/or software. Tomorrow I am going to try uninstalling all of the Creative drivers and software and see what happens. I also suspect Symantec's NIS, as this problem really seemed to surface the same day I upgraded to NIS 2003 (I was very careful about completely and thoroughly uninstalling NIS 2002 first).

Also, just for your own edification, I am quickly approaching the point at which the 'last resort' is seeming more and more viable. I did follow the windows repair link in your first reply and read the article. I printed it out. Thank-you.

And a final friendly little jab: my company runs our software on AIX (UNIX), and we don't have problems like this.

I believe I will enjoy these forums and be a frequent visitor. I do believe I have skills to contribure.

Kind Regards,

[LooseChippings]

Grimmwor

Come on board, the bigger selection of posters with a wide range of skills and knowledge adds to everybodies overall knowledge.

I have learned so much from this forum as have most people who post with a problem.

Once the majority of PC users get to the point where they can start to talk on equal terms with the big development companies the sooner they will get their act together; then they will give us what WE want not what they can get away with.

Use your experience and help others!

[LavaPool]

I have had the same Windows Explorer Error Signature ntdll.dll issue, except: this morning my XP Pro would not boot past the XP Pro screen - no desktop!

I too have an Audigy card that's been there for years.

Purchased a standalone XP Pro that the previous owner built to edit a/v using a firewire videocapture card. There are differences between his setup and mine: 1) I have NOT connected the XP Pro to the internet (for filesharing a/v projects); 2) I have a bigger printer connected and it is USB; 3) a different VCR; 4) a different audio mixer 5) a different synth.

Initially, i had a problem connecting the Canon MP730 printer-scanner-copier-fax-foto card reader, and got the error message IKernel.exe - Application Error: The instruction at "0x772200e4" referenced memory at"0x001639d8." The memory could not be "read." Click OK to terminate the program.

After replacing the USB cable, i have not seen a repeat of this message. I have no idea if doing this corrected whatever the problem was. The printer and all its functions work perfectly (except i haven't connected any fax).

However, a new error message appeared once each time during a work session: Windows Explorer Error Signature: Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something the information you were working on might be lost. Please tell Microsoft about this problem. We have created an error report that you can send to us (the 'puter is not connected to the web):
Error Signature
AppName: explorer.exe
AppVer: 6.0.2800.1106
ModName: ntdll.dll
ModVer: 5.1.2600.1217
Offset 00007eb2
followed by a bunch of codes and numerous modules: Explorer.EXE, ntdll.dll, kernel32.dll, msvcrt.dll, ADVAP132.dll, RPCRT.dll, GDI32.dll, USER32.dll, SHLWAPI.dll, SHELL32.dll, ole32.dll, OLEAUT32.dll, BROWSEUI.dll, SHDOCVW.dll, UxTheme.dll, comctl32.dll (twice), appHelp.dll, CLBCATQ.DLL, COMRes.dll, VERSION.dll.

The message ends with the following address:
C:\DOCUME~1\GETBEN (previous owner's "name")~1\LOCALS~1\TEMP\WER61.tmp.dir00\appcompat. txt

Each time the explorer.exe error message popped up, they were almost identical, except for a change in a digit here and there.

This morning, the P4, 1.7GHz XP Pro with 768MB PC2100 RAM wouldn't boot past the XP Pro screen – no desktop. The 'puter has 2 HDs, CD player, DVD burner and a 200w power supply.

Uncabled the USB printer, but no success.

What do you think is the cause: Could it have something to do with Digital Product ID used to identify a license because i moved the computer to another State; an IP address issue; compatibility problem (no IRQ issues seen under Hardware Devices); memory or power supply; or what?

What do i do to get my setup running as smoothly as it was under the previous owner's setup? You can probably tell from my qs that I am not a tekkie, so please help with step-by-step instructions if possible.

Thanks,
LavaPool

[Grimmwor]

LavaPool,

The regrettable truth is that I was unable to find a solution to my (our??) little problem, and I spent ALOT of time researching it! I recently read somewhere (a column in last months PC World magazine?) the theory that Windows has a half-life, and with each release since the original Windows DOS extension back in 1983, that half-life has been extended just a little bit. Did you know that when you shell out that $200 bucks for windows xp what you are actually buying is a half-life extension? LOL! I believe with XP we are up to a half-life of about 9 months.

I am of course kidding, but I found that article to be very amusing, and had read it right about the time I was having that dynamic link library problem, and it had in fact been just about 9 or 10 months since I put this pc together and installed a nice, new hot of the presses copy of WinXP Home Ed.

As much as it pains me to say it, in the end, I did find the advice presented by Mr. Loosechippings to be my only option. I even took it a step further. I had been thinking about picking up a second hard drive for some time now (for more storage space), and found this to be the perfect excuse to do so. I bought my new hard drive (a WD 80gig special edition with 8MB cache, the same one I already have in my pc; it's a good drive, and I recommend it) along with a pci controller board, installed them, and got to work. I began by applying a fresh install of windows to the new hard drive. Once I had accomplished that, I added the old hard drive (with the unbootable windows partition). Having done this, I was able to access all of the files on the old hard drive. I methodically went through and copied all the data that I wanted to salvage to a new directory on the new hard. I then used some partition management software called Paragon Partition Manager to completely erase and reformat the old hard drive, and then created three new partitions: a 3gig swapfile partition, a 60gig software installation partition, and a 17gig partition for Linux. I also partitioned the new hard drive into two logical partitions. In the end, I was left with a windows environment with a 15gig C drive for windows xp and a full windows xp backup (did you know that you can enable XP Pros backup feature on Home edition? unfortunately, i didn't find out until after going through all of this!), a 65gig D drive for data, music files, movie files, software downloads, etc, etc, a 3gig P drive for my windows swapfile (which is on a separate physical hard drive from windows), and a 60gig S drive for all of my software installs.

This setup is working beautifully for me, and I have an environment from which I can recover from just about any disaster.

Anyway, good luck with your problem. I think your best bet is to do a Repair install (which, it is worth mentioning, is NOT technically what I did; I did a complete new install on a new hard drive).

Regards,

[Play_The_0dds]

the reason people, even very knowledgeable people suggest repair/reformat is with windows so many things can be the cause of the same problem, the one originally posted is software, not hardware, you could spend days,weeks,months, even years trying to figure this out, and even if you stop the error message, you may not have fixed the entire problem. many people post here how slow their pc has become, but they "removed the virus" or "uninstalled the program" either way, damage was done, just because a virus was removed doesn't mean it repaired all the damaged files. microsoft should make its programming code at least a little "open" just for diagnostic purposes, but we bought the systems, we must live with the beast. the reason the repair option is on the install disk is so you dont have to spend a lot of time on a pointless quest. system restore (which very rarely helps) is another attempt by microsoft to give you a fix . just a question: How many people have got their computer back from a shop, formated and reinstalled, not fixed, they just dumped your stuff and reinstalled? and you paid quite a bit to have your stuff lost.

[Orien2]

Originally Posted by Grimmwor

I am getting the following error when moving files around on my hard drive, particularly when I move items (drag and drop) on my start menu. I have Windows XP SP1. I use Norton Internet Security 2003, and keep both patched and up to date. I have not had any viruses. The problem seemed to start sometime after I installed the ntdll buffer overflow vulnerability patch and installed Norton Internet Security 2003 (I had NIS 2002 all last year; I uninstalled and upgraded to 2003).

I get the following error message in a pop-up dialog box:

"Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Here are the error details:

Error Signature
AppName: explorer.exe
ModVer: 5.1.2600.1217
AppVer: 6.0.2800.1221
Offset: 00007ec4
ModName: ntdll.dll

An important thing to note: I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Sound card. When this problem occurs, the Creative Volume Control and Creative MediaSource Go! icons in my system tray disappear (but not any of the other icons in my system tray), and then the screen goes blank for a moment (even the Windows task bar and start button disappear for a moment), and then everything comes back and seems to be OK (except for the Creative system tray objects).

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling sound blaster drivers and utilities. Uninstalling and reinstalling NIS. Reapplying the windows ntdll patch. It has been suggested to me that I should perform a Repair Installation, but you know what, I do not accept that as a viable fix to any problem. It is absolutely absured (IMHP) to completely reinstall an OS to correct an error message. I guess because I am a programmer, I think like a programmer. There is a bug somewhere; we need to find it and correct it, not shoot it with a shotgun.

Anyway, any help/ideas/suggestions/thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Just reply to this post and I'll get an email. I have conducted an exhaustive search on the internet, and there are other people with this exact same problem and error message (same offset), so I know I am not the other one. The only solution I've been able to find so far is to do a repair install. That's bullcrap.

Try this chico it isn't a certified solution I'm a novelist not a software engineer but I did this and it worked.

Getting rid of explorer errors in computers with the AMD chip on board.
It'll leave you vulnerable to virus maybe but at least you'll be able to use your computer unless you are terminally stupid then you should have no trouble with it. If you are and prone to sue then forget everything I just told you.
1.click the Start button at the bottom left of your screen
2.click the Control Panel menu item
3.then double-click the System icon.
4.Click the Advanced tab
5.Find the item marked Performance right under there is a button that says Settings.
6.Click the Data Execution Prevention tab.
7.You'll see two options in that window click the second option that says "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select."
8. when you are finished with that then click the 'add...' button it should be visable at the bottom of the box. then you have to find where the file 'explorer.exe' resides on your computer most of the time it's something like this c:\windows\explorer.exe anyway add explorer to that list. It'll give you a warning just ignore it and click ok. Then you reboot and if you try it everything should work just fine.


and add any program you are sure isn't a trojan but you are having a devil of a time getting it to run to that list as well. Good luck, man.

[LetsDrag]

Alright... im tired of seeing all these stuff about repair system.. BLAH BLAH..


easy fix: "And works cause i "had" the same problem."

First go to http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?ntdll

Scroll down and download the file

Extract the file from the zipped folder

Copy the ntdll.dll file

go to start>run> type in: C:

go to program files then go to the "Internet Explorer" folder.

paste the file in the folder and also paste it in the plugins folder which is located inside of the Internet Explorer Folder.

There ya go... how much simpler can it be?

[OlegP]

Well, the idea to get that ntdll.dll file was good, but you need to copy it to windows explorer folder.
What I did is, I typed the name of that file in search bar under Start menu. Then clicked Search. It found all the locations of the dll file. Then right click on each location and chose Open containing folder. Then you copy a new file and paste it into each folder. You will get a conformation box if you want to replace an old file and you confirm Yes.
After this procedure my problem has gone. )))

[bitrunner]

I know I'm bumping an old thread here, but I thought it notable that someone else was having this problem on a PC whos purpose was A/V editing. I have more than a handful of XP rigs floating around my home and work, all and the only one that came up with this problem is my dedicated Webcam machine, with some A/V progs on it. This got me thinking, maybe one of those progs could be the culpret, somehow corrupting this .dll. So for the sake of future visitors to this thread, here are the Programs
NCH Software Suite - some of their free version programs
i.e. Priism Video Converter
Webcam Max
Cam Studio
Windows Essential codec pack (have this on all my PC's so I don't think
this is the culprit, but it could be a newer
version than the others)
I also ran Comodo system cleaner on it recently to clean up after some other webcam/video programs that I removed
Also the effected machine has a new Western Digital 800BB and a VERY recent clean install of XP Pro SP3, and has BARELY been used. Never been on any torrents or visited any questionable sites, or downloaded anything but the above progs.
I'd also like to say I'm a big fan of the reformat & reinstall, which I do only after pulling out all my docs, contacts, favorites, etc. for reinsertion into the new install. So if you're paying someone to fix your PC and they reinstall without retrieving your valuable data you are getting ripped, and you should just learn to do it yourself. Even if windows won't boot, you boot from a live CD(Puppy Linux is good with great partitioning utils ) and access the HDD from that to get to all your goodies. Anyway, I don't believe this little bug is that serious, and only reformat on old installs where the registry is bloated or corrupted, or in the case of viruses/spyware.
I will probbably be overwriting the .dll as mentioned in this thread, just thought I could throw some things out there to possible narrow down whats causing this nusance. God bless you if this happens to you if you only have one PC!