How to prevent a BHO from crashing Explorer.exe
I was recently turned on to theWindows Live Toolbar, which has so many cool features that it quickly became one of my favorite IE add-ons. Unfortunately, after installing the toolbar, I began to notice that Explorer.exe would crash on startup. It doesn't happen all the time, but it is annoying enough to make me consider leaving this cool utility in the dust.
How do I deal with this bad behavior? Am I forced to make an uncomfortable decision?
Unless you specify otherwise, BHOs are loaded for both Internet Explorer (iexplore.exe) and Explorer (explorer.exe) processes. You could try to prevent your DLL from being loaded by checking the process name in DllMain and return FALSE (thereby preventing your DLL from being loaded) if the name contains "Explorer.exe." However, there's an easier way–one that works even for DLLs that you didn't write.
You can prevent a BHO from being loaded in Explorer.exe with the use of a simple registry value, NoExplorer. You can read more about this value here. In a nutshell:
Open Registry Editor and navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ Browser Helper Objects
You'll see some sub-keys in GUID format, depending upon the number of BHOs installed in your system. ...select the appropriate GUID. In the right-pane, add a new REG_DWORD named NoExplorer and set it's value to 1.
Actually, neither the value nor the type make any difference–as long the NoExplorer entry exists, Explorer will not load the BHO.
As it turns out, the folks at Windows Live Toolbar tried to use this poorly documented feature and...uh...got it wrong. They created a subkey rather than a value, which just doesn't work in the same way. Fortunately, it only takes a few moments to make it all better.
I was having the same trouble, every time I tried to nav from say My computer to another part, It would stop me and say, abnormal termination. This was after loaded the new Yahoo toolbar and then found out that I couldn't nav my C: drive at all. My only solution at first was to go to system restore and back up a few days and not install the new toolbar.
Then today, I tried to nav my C: drive again and it was back, (I recently downloaded IE7 from yahoo) and this time, I found this and tried it and it worked when I added it to all the sub-keys. Thanks.
