I have a problem. An irritating problem. A stupid problem. and I am going to share it with you all in hopes of finding a solution less drastic than a complete reformat of my harddrive.

I use windows explorer all the time to flip through my files and find what I need, it also helps me with organization. HOWEVER, here recently (like in the past couple of days), when I open a folder with an image file in it (*.jpg, *.psd, *.whatever), windows explorer crashes on me. If I try to save anything to a file with an image it, THAT program crashes, if I try to navigate to the folder with the image using IE, then IE crashes, and eventually Windows XtraProblems crashes. I can't switch to linux yet, cause I don't have a second harddrive. I cannot support linux with the small amount of space I have left. So until that day comes, I have to survive WinXP. Has anyone else had a similar problem or have any theories as to why this is happening?

I have tried:
____Cold booting
____Restarting
____Deleting the filetypes' registrations and re-registering them.
____Virus Scan
____Spybot S&D

so far, no good...

Since you did the reg edit thing I assume you can handle removing internet explorer from windows components, if that does not work you could try turning off the image preview if that is giving you issue, but I assume you already tried this stuff. Getting all the windows updates maybe a good idea but it is kind of out there.
A very drastic option would be to change your shell, like using litestep instead, but really I don’t think that will make you very happy.
Some times when I have issues with XP I make a new user account and try to duplicate the errors in that account, you could try that.

Screw it, Im formatting