wesi,
I'm sorry to hear of your problems.
It has been a fair amount of time since you posed your question, and it appears that you may have stumped our experts.
I'm not sure that I actually understand your question (I'm easily confused). Let me stumble my way through some information that may or may not be helpful.
Your specific question appears to be asking about a free utility to view photos. The answer to that is there are several… however, I think that your question is actually deeper than that.
Any of the free picture viewers programs stilll operate in the windows environment… just like windows photo viewer does. Therefore, I suspect that if there is a problem with the picture files themselves, then the same problem will occur whichever photo viewer you are using. I am unclear if you are trying to opened recovered picture files, or if these are picture files that just quit opening. I'm going to assume these are recovered files, but a file that has been contaminated for some reason, might react the same way. That brings me to the "Kmode Exception Not Handeled" error. Basically, that is windows way of tellng you that "I'd like to open the file that you've asked me to, but I am totally confused on how to do that!" That goes back to my assumption that you are trying to open recovered files. Recovery programs recover many partial files. As you open and close files on your computer, "old" files are constantly being partially overwritten. Your computer moves files around on your hard drive every time you resave a file, or sometimes it moves stuff around as it tries to optimize your space on your drive. When you explore your files, your computer will report to you the "topmost" data that it sees, but recovery software will find files that are 3 or 4 layers deep. The data has been overwritten, and it may have been partially overwritten a time or two. When the recovery program recovers the file, it only recovers what it finds on the layer it is working on. Therefore it may have only partially recovered the file. When you try to open the recovered files, windows may think it knows what kind of file it is, but when it tries to open it - information that it expects to find to help it open the file is missing - and windows gets confused, throws the error, and leads to a BSOD.
The other time, that I'm aware of, that you get that error is if there is an error with a driver. The driver is a file that tells windows how to utilize the information it finds in a file. It's kind of the key to interpreting the data. If a driver has been scrambled, then you will get the Kmode error. When windows tries to open the photo without a good driver, it's like if you try to read a book that was written in a language you've never seen before.
Error 1962 is usually a boot priority error. Apparently this is fairly prevalent in Lenovo computers, though I'm currently typing on one and I've never had this problem. Have a look here and see if this helps: https://howtoremove.guide/error-1962-lenovo-no-operating-system-found-fix/
Unfortunately, the above is mostly info and may be less than helpful in solving your actual problem, but perhaps it will lead you to ask a question that I'll understand better… or maybe someone who knows more than I do will step in.
