I have a tech question for the community. I set up my PC last night, and already I'm having troubles.

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition on an Athlon 1.2g processor with an 80gig hard drive that's less than a year old. I've been saving the digital photos from our Kodak in a file under My Documents called Archived Photos. Every time I finish putting a group of pictures on my web album, I move the original high-res images to the Archived Photos folder.

I thought that some of my pictures had somehow become corrupted, because every time I would click on a particular folder of images in Windows
Explorer, it would list about half of the files and then crash. So I reluctantly deleted the two files that I suspected were causing the problem. However, when I moved a new folder over into the Archived file, the same thing started happening. I also noticed that Windows Explorer was placing incorrect file icons next to four of the files in the folder... instead of showing a Photoshop icon, they were listed with Internet Explorer icons and one of them had a cute little yellow star next to it.

Last night, I tried to download the most recent pictures from the camera onto the computer. They saved to the system with no trouble, and I was able to open them all up in PhotoShop and resave them as TIFs like I normally do... but then when I tried to look inside the folder in Windows Explorer, the same crash occurred, and it locked up the PC. Attempting to use Task Manager to close Windows Explorer had no effect, and I had to do a hard shutdown and reboot.

So last night before I went to bed, I scheduled a disk check and restarted. This morning, it had finished, but it didn't help; the same problem occured when I tried to look at the new pictures.

To any knowledgable persons reading this message: does this sound like there's something wrong with my hard drive, or could it be that the actual Windows Explorer software needs to be reinstalled? I'm sincerely hoping it is the latter, since my CD burner died back in March and I haven't been able to back up any of the photos I've taken with the digital camera since then. If it is the hard drive, I need to move quickly because I think the warranty is about to expire.

I went to Microsoft's support site and found one article in a FAQ that sounded like a similar problem, but it's only similar and the fix involves editing the registry which I'm not sure is something I should attempt.

Gri"big bucks and a big bad bottle of beer to the first person who provides a working solution!"shny