man, cometimes i wish i could have bill gates over for dinner, you know. i would really like to talk to him.
i have windows xp on my computer and i suspect that it and explorer are not very good friends. when i have the internet open, i very often get a sudden message that there is a problem with explorer and that it needs to close. then it asks whether i want to send a problem report. any time i have clicked yes, i gave up and cancelled the report after about a half an hour cause it just sits there.
is there a fix for this? it makes me very unhappy. it also happened suddenly yesterday with Word in the middle of a very important document, but i managed to recover the document.

If I were you I would go to Microsoft updates and be sure to update. That new MSblast virus is attacking XP versions too. I think there is a security patch there available. Also be sure you have an updated virus protection. If that isn't the problem, you may need to clean your cache, run defrag, and run scandisk to make sure there are no errors. Dwight may have some better answers for you but theres a start that won't harm anything.

here are some Knowledge Base articles to look at.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;810887

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;293623

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822206

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817833

Maybe these will help, or at least give you some ideas.

Great answers from both angela-cc and LVLF. One of the Microsoft Windows critical updates concerns this notification applet.

Also, check to see if you're running "Igfxtray.exe".

Click Start/Run/ (type)

msconfig

Click OK
Click the Startup tab and look for "Igfxtray.exe" (it may appear as "Igfxtray") and "HKCMD". If you see them, you can disable them by unchecking the entry and restarting your system. At restart, you'll see a notice that you're using the MSCONFIG. You can check the "Don't show...don't open MSCONFIG" option and OK the notification dialog box.

Details about IgfxTray.exe

The following information is from the link above:

IGFXTRAY.EXE: Intel Graphics Tray. System Tray icon which gets installed with the drivers for onboard VGA cards based on the Intel 81x graphics chipset. Double-clicking on it enables you to quickly change the display resolution, save your current Display Scheme, or configure your onboard graphics card. You can also configure keyboard hotkeys (shortcuts – this is handled by another background task called HKCMD). You can access the same features through the "Intel Graphics Technology" icon in the Control Panel.

Recommendation :
Although great in theory, on some PCs we have found that whenever IGFXTRAY and HKCMD are running, Windows Explorer is prone to hanging and showing as "not responding" in the Task List. Our recommendation, therefore, is that you should not have this tray icon running, and that you should also not use the hotkey facility that comes with it. Disable both IGFXTRAY and HKCMD with Startup Manager.

Dwight