A fix I want to share

[Clean_Rich]

I'm running XP pro and I've been having a particular crash problem for quite awhile now, and finally fixed it today. It usually happened when opening Explorer windows, all of a sudden all Explorer windows would close and I would get one of those "send or "don't send" messages that said:

AppName: explorer.exe AppVer: 6.0.2800.1106 ModName: mfc42.dll
ModVer: 6.0.8665.0 Offset: 00001b3e

Also, my whole desktop would disappear and then reappear shortly thereafter, minus some of my systray icons. Needless to say, this was a major pain in my rear.

The first thing I did was a repair of XP so I could be sure that the copy of mfc42.dll that resides in the C:\Windows\System32 directory was good. This alone didn't fix the problem and I verified that by opening various Explorer windows such as, My Computer, Recycle Bin, Windows Explorer, ect. After opening and closing about 3 or 4 of them, I got the same error. The next thing I did was to do a search on my hard drive for the file mfc42.dll. It came up with about 5 of them, one in a game folder, and a few in some programs. I noticed that they were all different versions so I just renamed all of them except the one in C:\Windows\System32 to mfc42.old. I'm pretty convinced that this has fixed my crashing problem, which has been going on for months. I have continuously opened and closed various Explorer windows and not a single crash yet. I normally would have had several by now. I've tried all the programs with the renamed mfc42.dll's also and they seem to work perfectly so far. I'm sooo happy now. Hope this helps someone.

 

[Clean_Rich]

Re: Re: A fix I want to share

Originally posted by Enyo
Did you use sfc.exe to do this and still have no luck? The system file checker was built for the purpose and is the first thing i use when encountering dll errors.



I would have taken the copy from c:\windows\system32\dllcache\ (or extracted it from the service pack files or the CD) and replaced the file in System32 with that one using the inuse.exe tool.

That would be my method anyway and is how i fixed a issue with ntdll.dll, other than the inuse.exe step i had to use "PendingFileRenameOperations" setting from within the registry which had windows replace the file at boot time.

Seeming as DLL errors are common a full repair operation may be overkill, but still if it works!

Now where were you when I needed you, Enyo?

I did try sfc, but when I ran it, a dos window came up for a split second and then disappeared?? I'm sure the repair was overkill, but I didn't know how to replace dll's without using sfc. I'll remember your method if I have to replace anymore .dll's though. I'm just happy that it worked and this freakin' thing isn't crashing anymore.

 

[Clean_Rich]

Yeah, thanks Enyo. I have a feeling that the repair of XP was pretty much unnecessary, but it did no harm either. The other part of the fix was really quick, it took about 1 minute to rename the 4 or 5 instances of mfc42.dll and that was it. I was wondering if XP would complain about me renaming those files but it didn't. I did it in Windows Explorer by just right clicking and choosing "rename". That crash has still not occured since I did this either. It definitely would have by now, so I'm pretty happy.

 

[gonaads]

Here is a link with info on that particular .dll file that was givin you fits (Microsoft Knowledge Base).

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 813181