Tech Support Me » explorer http://www.techsupport.me.uk Your one stop resource for free pc technical support Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:27:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Opening Control Panel or Network Properties crashes Vista Explorer http://www.techsupport.me.uk/2009/02/25/opening-control-panel-or-network-properties-crashes-vista-explorer/ http://www.techsupport.me.uk/2009/02/25/opening-control-panel-or-network-properties-crashes-vista-explorer/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:53:16 +0000 robbrad http://www.techsupport.me.uk/?p=78 This problem started to hit me just the other day, I litrally tried everything I could to to solve it, removing programs using appwiz.cpl (because I could not get into control panel) – Running appwiz.cpl from the run line opens add and remove programs without going into control panel.

Anyway this didnt solve it! so I did some more digging and I narrowed it down to a faulty cpl file existing on my system. Heres what I did

  1. First create a temp folder on your desktop
  2. Goto c:\windows\system32 and browse the folder
  3. Then sorted the files by type and scrolled down to the CPL files (Control Panel files – more info on these here)
  4. Move the CPL files out to the temp folder you created on your desktop
  5. Tada! control panel and network properties should now work again but you have no icons in them!
  6. What you need to do is move the CPL files back from your desktop temp directory into your c:\windows\system32 a few at a time and testing control panel and network properties each time until it crashes again  - this is a trial and error process until lyou find the bad cpl file. Good Luck

Once you have found the offending CPL file(s) you should be able to see what was causing the problem usually its 3rd party sound card drivers – maybe try installing a diffrent version to get the functionality back that you lost when you copied out the bad cpl from your system folder. Hope this helps!

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