gdiplus.dll causing most things to crash (Explorer, Defender, Photoshop, etc)

[byrd]

No idea why this started happening (Not really anything has been installed or changed in the last couple of days) but quite a few things are crashing, for example, explorer.exe crashes when opening images (Using the 'Preview' thing) or opening the Games window, Defender simply won't start, start++ won't start, Nvidia control panel crashes, etc.

Here is an example of Defender crashing:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: MSASCui.exe
Application Version: 1.1.1505.0
Application Timestamp: 45ad82d9
Fault Module Name: gdiplus.dll
Fault Module Version: 5.2.6000.16386
Fault Module Timestamp: 4549bcaf
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00032ad0
OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.768.3
Locale ID: 3081
Additional Information 1: 8d13
Additional Information 2: cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311
Additional Information 3: 8d13
Additional Information 4: cdca9b1d21d12b77d84f02df48e34311

Read our privacy statement:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=50163&clcid=0x0409

Each one of the error boxes from the various crashes mentions gdiplus.dll so I tried replacing the file with a 'fresh' copy, using regsvr to re-register it and just some other things but I haven't gotten anywhere.

I really need to fix this. :/

I don't know what details would be useful, just a rather standard Vista [32Bit/Home Premium] setup.

 

[cdfmxtek]

Hey,
I am having this exact same problem. Did you ever find a solution?? This quite annoying.