Clearly the original poster's problem was not created by editing explorer.exe, the symptoms do not match up, yet all of you seem hung up on that point. Never listen to what the user says the problem is, if they knew so much, they wouldn't be asking. Look at the symptoms and work back from there.

A quick search of Google would have lead you to one of MANY sites (mostly in message board format) that come to the exact same conclusions as this: http://www.mcpmag.com/columns/articl...itorialsID=729

That is: the issue is most likely with the bios, but could maybe possibly be with the drive... but check the bios first.

If that doesn't fix it, then we can look to more obscure issues like Prescott L2 cache and such that may also cause this problem.

cheers,

catch