I wish I had some more detail of what's happening, it just seems at this point to be random. Some days everything's fine, quite often I'll have several crashes of Explorer in a day. About once a week I can count on having a completely unresponsive interface where I have to use the power button to get its attention. All my drivers and other stuff are up to date.
Hmm,Myrrh - are you using Start8(or an early build of StartIsBack) by any chance? Because I experienced something similar to your problem and eventually discovered that app was the culprit (though the latest version is stable at least on my hardware)
As usual, nothing useful in the system log, absolutely nothing at all the last three hours before I arrived this morning and had to push the button. I did find an Event 533, ESENT in the Application log. It indicates hardware, but having seen no other messages anywhere related to any of the hardware, I'm at a loss to determine what it could be. Code: taskhostex (172) WebCacheLocal: A request to write to the file "C:\Users\[me]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\WebCacheV01.dat" at offset 1245184 (0x0000000000130000) for 32768 (0x00008000) bytes has not completed for 36 second(s). This problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem. No Start8 but I did at one time have the trial of ModernMix from StarDock though. That has been uninstalled for quite a while. Sometimes, when it's about to lock up, things will just go into "not responding" mode, then I can click something else for a few seconds till it also becomes nonresponsive. At that point not even ctrl+alt+del will do anything. Once it starts acting like this, I know I will soon be reaching for the button, but I try to fight with it anyway and see if I can find "something" to kill that would unlock whatever is stuck.
One of the reasons I left 8 and returned to 7 was explorer crashes, if I disabled LAN, explorer would stop responding and crash too All my hardware is new and all my drivers were up to date, it would do it after a 100% clean install too One of 8's many bugs
My win8 has never crashed explorer when I wasn't going super-overboard with overclocking. Win8 is a lot more demanding than win7. If you are overclocked, you might want to tone it down a notch or two...
Third party addons can affect Windows Explorer stability, video codecs being one of them (for the icon previews of the files).
OP you need to back track to where it 1st started and like the other guy said check the logs to see what program you might have installed and so forth. More then one crash in one day means something is not working right lol duh. Sometimes getting apps from different places can put things on your system you didnt want. Could be a virus. I don't believe Stardock or codecs are your problem. Restore the system or reinstall. I've had this happen before but it was a very long time ago. From OS X, windows 7, 2008r2, win 8, win 2012 (I do allot of testing) nothing like that happens. ONLY if I go or download something that has been hacked or a crack or the like. Not that you do just saying..
I got exactly the same problem. Exactly the sake symptomes. Apps go into not responsive mode, task manager stops working and I need to reach power button.
i experienced that when i first installed a while back, looking closely at drivers and searching for latest , updating all including Intel chipset in my case solved the prob
I've been having the same problem for the past several months. Windows Explorer keeps crashing a lot. I was tempted to go back to Windows 7 but I am waiting for 8.1 to see if this bug has been fixed. If not it's back to Windows 7 for me. I've never had Windows Explorer crash on Windows 7.