Microsoft → [XP] MS Visual C++ Runtime error in explorer.exe

This error comes up a few seconds after i boot up. When I click ok or close the box explorer crashes and restarts itself, and after a few seconds this error reappears. if i just leave the error on the screen i can use all my other programs fine. But this is annoying me. I checked the knowledge base and couldnt find anything worthwhile so i was curious is anyone has seen this problem and could give me some insight on the whole deal

im running XP Pro, p4 2.2g, 512ram... just recently installed a few security patches from windowsupdate.com. and a new driver which was on windows update. Ive already rolled back the drive
thank you
-jason

Windows Explorer (which is your start menu, taskbar and folder browser) is explorer.exe not explorer.EXE. Windows never has explorer end with an all Caps file extension like that, and you can't rename it either (because it always runs in the background... unless you kill it).

said by Ctrl Alt Del:

---

Windows never has explorer end with an all Caps file extension like that

---

No, of course it doesn't... except on quite a few systems I looked at:

U:\>dir %systemroot%\explorer*
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 50C7-B05B

 Directory of C:\WINNT

05/08/2001  08:00              242,960 EXPLORER.EXE
05/08/2001  08:00                   80 EXPLORER.SCF
               2 File(s)        243,040 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  34,483,646,976 bytes free

OK, so the message said "Explorer.EXE" and not "EXPLORER.EXE", but I can think of at least one explanation, which doesn't require that the file on disk be named "Explorer" and not "EXPLORER". But that's beside the point.

If you mean to suggest that "Explorer.EXE" is not the Windows Explorer, then I see no evidence for that.

yeah, i understand what explorer.exe does, etc... but i think the fact that that error message says explorer.EXE is insignificant. When you go and look at how its listed it shows this

Directory of E:\WINDOWS

02/19/1675 09:12 PM 1,000,960 explorer.exe
2 File(s) 2,004,992 bytes
0 Dir(s) 7,272,091,648 bytes free

which brings up my second point... look at the date stamp...

Might be a virus to me...