File Explorer Regularly Locking Computer

I’ve been dealing with an ongoing issue lately where my computer is locking up and freezing for some reason. It always happens whenever I’m in a folder either trying to view, copy or move files around on my system.

What will happen is that I’ll click on a file or collection of files and normally try to send them to another folder location or copy them to move them somewhere else.

Normally, as soon as I right-click on the files to access the right-click menu, the system stops responding. I’ve determined lately that if I immediately go to Task Manager and stop the offending process my system recovers and I’m able to continue working.

If I let the system sit a little too long after that, under the impression that it’s working, it apparently locks up some other processes and goes into a loop of various application no longer responding to any input from me. If things get to that point, I normally have to manually kill a variety of processes and then manually restart the Explorer.exe application to recover Windows and begin working again.

What’s weird is that some of this is very familiar to what I believe my wife has been experiencing on her Vista laptop.

Anyone else experiencing this? I’m wondering if there’s some kind of Windows update that’s been released over the last couple of weeks that may have caused these issues for me on my Windows XP Pro machine.