I’ve been running Vista ever since it came out on MSDN and I’m pretty happy with it. There were two things that bothered me more then anything, The first one is Rundll32 crashes when I have a folder contianing videos in thumbnail mode and apparent random crashes of Explorer.exe.
Unable to find a good answer in the event log and getting around two crashes an hour, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I’m a software developer, but thruth be told, I haven’t touched anything else then C# in a few years now and I’ve never debugged programs I didn’t have the source code of, but having learned some tricks at last november’s TechEd, I installed the Debugging Tools for Windows and set WinDBG to be the JIT Debugger. Then I waited for a crash. And I didn’t have to wait long.
The first crash was explorer.exe. I didn’t even to debug it. I noticed it crashed inside CoFreeUnusedLibrariesEx call, which means it’s a refcounting issue (at least that’s what I think that’s usually the problem in a case like this), and I saw that the faulting module was heshell.dll, which is part of the free hex editor I installed a few weeks before. I just uninstalled the program and I haven’t see the crash since.
Then I waited for the thumbnail crash. And when it happened, it happened a lot. WinDBG must’ve popped up around 20 times for just one folder. In all cases the faulting module was iac25_32.ax, which is an Intel Indeo Audio codec. I figured it must be part of the K-Lite codec pack I have installed. So I removed it, then reinstalled it, without installing any Indeo codec. Unfortunatly it was still there. Then I tried removing it by hand, but it was protected. So I had to take ownership of the file, edit the security settings to allow me to delete it and then I was, finally, able to delete it.
So far I haven’t seen a crash.
I love Vista and I love WinDBG 
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