Browsing External HD leads to Error

Hello, I am running a Dell Inspiron E1505 with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, and I have a Western Digital MyBook Premium ES Edition External Hard drive. When I browse the contents of my Hard drive, I invariably receive an error message stating that Windows had to shut down Explorer due to an error. Explorer will then shut down and restart and I am able to continue working, but I cannot browse my external hard drive for more than a moment without this happening. In Event Viewer, this occurrence comes up as "Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2900.3156, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x047bc16c." or something similar, sometimes followed by an error event, "Fault bucket 583936815." If somebody could clue me in to the possible cause of this unrelenting error, which continually prevents me from browsing the contents of my external hard drive, I would be very grateful. Thanks, Chris

Hello,
Do you have Video, or other media files on this drive?
If so,
Windows XP Explorer has a 'feature' to provide a preview in the Details box on the left of the file you have selected, if it’s supported. Image files, HTML pages, video clips, MP3s, etc are all previewed (even with the folder view open).

If you have a large movie clip and it either is corrupt (ie. no index from a partial download) or it uses an unsupported codec, then Explorer tries to load the whole file. This can slow your computer a lot and prevent deleting/renaming/moving/etc the file until it’s finished.

Simply do the following:

• Click Start, then Run, type regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll and click "Ok".
• A window will pop up saying that the file has been unregistered successfully. (If you don't receive this window, or the window gives an error, then please post that in your reply.)
• Reboot your computer and see if the problem persists.

I did what you said and it worked! Thank you very much, I would have never figured that out otherwise.

Thanks HFCG, Good Tip. Nice to have your around again.:) Doug

Your welcome.