Fix: Windows Explorer Crashes on Right-Click

You're in File Explorer, you right-click a folder to rename it, and the whole window freezes. The spinning circle starts. Ten seconds later, Explorer restarts itself and your taskbar blinks out for a second. Sometimes you get a dialog saying explorer.exe – Application Error with exception code 0x80004005. It happens every single time you right-click, but only in certain folders, or only on certain file types. That pattern is the tell.

What's Actually Happening

Windows Explorer doesn't draw the right-click menu itself. It asks every registered shell extension to contribute items. Things like 7-Zip, Dropbox, Adobe Acrobat, OneDrive, Notepad++, and half a dozen utilities you installed two years ago all hook into this menu. When you right-click, Explorer calls each one and waits for a response.

If any one of those extensions is broken — say, a DLL that got half-uninstalled, or an old version that doesn't play nice with Windows 11 23H2 — Explorer hangs waiting for it. Windows gives up after a few seconds and kills the process. That's your crash. The extension is the culprit, not Explorer.

The reason it's intermittent is that not every file invokes every extension. Right-clicking a .zip file loads the 7-Zip handler. Right-clicking a regular folder doesn't. That's why you can right-click on your desktop fine but the moment you touch a PDF, boom.

Find the Broken Extension

You can't fix this by guessing. You need to see what's loaded and disable things one at a time. NirSoft's ShellExView is the tool for this. It's free, it's been around since the XP days, and Microsoft's own support engineers use it.

Download ShellExView from nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html. Get the 64-bit version if you're on 64-bit Windows (you are).
Extract the ZIP anywhere. Run shexview.exe. Click Yes on the UAC prompt.
The list loads every shell extension on the machine. Press F8 or click Options > Filter by Extension Type and select Context Menu. This narrows it to just the ones that show up when you right-click.
Click the Company column header to sort. You'll see entries from Microsoft, and a bunch from third parties. Leave the Microsoft ones alone. Everything with a non-Microsoft company name is a suspect.
Select all non-Microsoft entries (click the first, hold Shift, click the last). Press F7 to disable them. ShellExView turns them pink.

Now right-click the thing that was crashing Explorer. If it doesn't crash, you've confirmed the diagnosis. If it still crashes, you disabled the wrong category — go back and enable your filter to All and repeat.

After you confirm the crash is gone, start enabling extensions one at a time. Enable one, right-click, test. When Explorer crashes, you've found it. Write down the filename in the Filename column — that's what you need for the next step.

Kill It Permanently

Disabling in ShellExView is temporary. A reinstall of the parent app brings it back. You've got two options.

Option 1 — uninstall or update the app. This is the right move 80% of the time. If the broken extension belongs to Dropbox, update Dropbox. If it's an ancient version of Adobe Reader, uninstall it and use the browser's PDF viewer instead. The real fix is updating the software, not fighting the extension.

Option 2 — remove the registry entry. If the app is abandoned or you don't need the menu entry, find the CLSID in ShellExView's CLSID column, then search for it under:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{guid-here}\InprocServer32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{guid-here}

Back up the key first (right-click > Export). Then delete it. Restart Explorer with taskkill /f /im explorer.exe && start explorer.exe from an admin Command Prompt, and test.

One warning: never delete a CLSID you can't identify. Some of them are load-bearing Windows components. If the Company column in ShellExView says Microsoft, leave it alone.

If It Still Crashes

Then the extension theory is wrong, and you're looking at something else. Check these in order:

Run Explorer in safe mode. Boot into Safe Mode and right-click. If it doesn't crash there, it's definitely a third-party hook. If it does crash in Safe Mode, you might have a corrupted user profile — create a new local account and test.
Check the Event Viewer. Open eventvwr.msc, go to Windows Logs > Application, and look for a red Error entry from Application Error at the moment of the crash. The Faulting module name field names the exact DLL. That's your smoking gun, and it beats guessing every time.
Run SFC and DISM. sfc /scannow then DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth. This fixes corrupted system files that can cause Explorer to fail on its own. Slow, but worth doing once.
Test in a clean user profile. If a new account works fine, copy your files over and keep using the new profile. Rebuilding the old one is more work than it's worth.

If you've done all four and it's still crashing, post the Faulting module name from Event Viewer on a forum. That one string tells anyone helping you exactly where to look.