Fences is forcing Explore to crash on a fairly fresh Windows 7 system. After 3 times Fences realizes it's probably the cause and shuts itself down which resolves the problem as does uninstalling the application.
It took me a while to find a solution for this as one is not available on Stardock's website yet I know they have known about it for sometime now.
So here is the Tech Doc they should have.
1) Make sure you have the most recent version of Fences installed. At the time of this writing the version is 2.10.
2) Make sure you are running the most recent Graphic Card Drivers available for your system.
3) You can do this with Fences installed or removed. Create a new folder on the desktop. Move all icons that currently reside on your desktop in to that folder. NOTE: You will not be able to move system links such as Computer, Control Panel, Network, Recycle Bin... Don't worry about those, they are unlikely part of the problem.
4) Once you have removed all icons from the desktop, reinstall Fences if you have it removed OR right click on your desktop and choose to Enable Fences.
It should fix the problem and Fences should start normally and if you have tried reinstalling may revert to the default colors and default fence names.
5) Take the icons in your temp folder and put them back one at a time on the desktop. At this point it's a matter of trail and error to find the culprit but usually it is related to an icon that references a missing folder or possibly a missing executable. The crash may or may not reoccur until one of the following happens. For me it was due to an icon to My Videos that had been moved to another drive to free up space on an SSD drive.
a. The fence containing the problematic icon is moved.
b. The icon is moved from one fence to another or to the desktop.
c. You disconnect a monitor in a multi monitor system and all fences and icons are forced to a single monitor.
At any rate, Stardock should fix this issue. Crashing Explorer can cause some serious side effects including a complete OS crash where the OS may need to be reinstalled though this would be rare it did occur on my system.
As a side note....
They should also fix the problem that IF you do remove a secondary monitor, fences and icons can overlap. By default Windows does not have this problem. One fence should respect the framing of another fence.
Hopefully this has resolved the problem for you. If not, try also removing the system icons which is done from by right clicking on the desktop and choosing Personalize > Change Desktop Icons.
If you find this useful / or not, drop a note below so others will know if this is a general fix, or just one of many.
-Darv
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