explorer.exe crashing when video files are selected?

my computer is being amazing. With some video files and not others it decides to crash explorer.exe. one type that does crash is a ".wmv" file that i can't tell what it is encoded with, becasue wheni open the containing file it still crashes though i am able to interact with the file that contains it for a smal period of time.

when i try to right click it and see what it is encoded with i get another error a program called data debugger crashes and it(my computer) goes haywire.

i recently updated my videocard drivers and it fixed it for some video files, before i updated, every single file that i had would crash.

so what is going on and how do i fix this?

Os?

When you click the video file, does it try to open a video player, and then explorer.exe crashes,

or

does explorer.exe crash the second after you try to open the video file?

im working on windows xp professional, service pack two.

as for what happens, i open the containing folder and it crashes. I belive that it is trying to load the thumbnail view for it.

XP SP2

I get this EVERYTIME i open a folder with a .avi init, then i have to ctrl+alt+delete and close dr watson to make the pc work agen

Something similar has happened to me. While trying to generate previews, it crashed explorer. I believe I turned off caching in thumbs.db.

Yeah i turned it off and it still does it lol .

[ Had already tryed that ] ;)

well its good to know that im not alone, but how do i get to thumbs.db?

I had same problem. Was caused by 2 Xvid codecs. Renamed one in syst32 folder (to disable) and problem
solved. Check your codecs with Sherlock (google "codecs sherlock" if you don't have it) . Check bottom of list-
may be damaged xvid codec or two codecs causing windows conflict and freeze. Good luck.

In vista i had a similar problem until recently. Instead of explorer crashing, I'd just get constant error popup dialogs about explorer when viewing a folder with video files in it.
Fixed since I installed the latest klite codec pack though, I think.