XP’s ‘other’ Explorer can be a real CPU hog

By Fred Langa A bad naming decision by Microsoft means you have two different “Explorers” on your XP system. Here’s what to do when the lesser-known one starts causing trouble.

Explorer executable file drives an XP user nuts

Don Clucas sounded pretty desperate when he wrote:

• “If I leave my computer on for a day, explorer.exe takes over and all I can do is shut down. It is not iexplore.exe, which I can find, but the other one that I cannot find in the computer.

  “[The file] takes over and nothing else works. It’s driving me nuts. I have Googled until exhausted and still no solution. Help!!!”
  

I understand your frustration, Don. In part, it’s because there are two “Explorers” on your Windows XP machine — and everyone else’s, too. You see, Microsoft’s original plan, way back in the mid-90s, was to create a single “Explorer” that would let you navigate everywhere: your hard drive, the Web, the local dry cleaners, wherever. (Well, maybe not the dry cleaners.)

That plan was partially realized but then derailed by the antitrust actions that prevented Microsoft from encroaching further onto other Web browsers’ turf. So, we now have two separate Explorers on our systems: “Internet Explorer” (iexplore.exe), the well-known Web browser that gets all the attention, and the less-well-known “Windows Explorer” (explorer.exe).

Even though you may be less familiar with the name “Windows Explorer,” you use the program all the time. Explorer.exe is the component of Windows that provides the desktop, file browser, taskbar, and most of the windows through which we interact with our PCs.

Related posts:

1. Replacement For The *Other* “Explorer”
2. More Explorer Shortcut Tricks
3. Real-Life Example Of WPA Running Amok
4. More Custom Explorer Views, And Beyond
5. Customize Your Internet Explorer