Explorer.exe problem

For the past month or so "explorer.exe" will randomly restart itself every now and then, mainly when I am opening "My Documents" or "My Computer" but also happens at random times as well. Taskbar will dissappear momentarily and when it restarts half of my normal programs dont reload. Everything still works fine afterwards, just kind of an annoying problem and I am sure it isnt very good for my computer to keep doing this. It doesnt happen more than probably 2-3 times a day but it is becoming quite annoying to deal with. I have also noticed within the past week that, again every now and then, when I go to "Save an Image" in Mozilla Firefox it will shutdown Mozilla. Just quickly closes and I have to restart Mozilla and then everything works fine again. I am assuming this has to deal with the same problem as explorer.exe restarting but figured i would mention it as well. I have AVG version 8, Ad-Aware, PG2, and Spybot and have recently DLed and installed/ran all the programs suggested on here. I posted this in the malware forum originally and they said my comp is completely clean from malware and i should post in this forum. If i need to post any logs of any kind please let me know and if anyone knows how to fix this i would greatly appreciate it! Thanks guys!

 

Well I have had Peer Guardian 2 for quite some time now and it never acted up before. I guess I can try to uninstall it and see if the problem still persists though...any other ideas on where this problem could be coming from?

 

Uninstalled PG2 yesterday and explorer.exe is still restarting. Any other ideas, this is starting to really bug me?

 

Ok I turned off automatic reboot...now do I just wait for the BSOD and if so will I only get the BSOD if its a hardware problem?

 

It's also possible that this could be caused by Shell Execute Hooks (the context menu add-on's). Have you installed any software since the issue started to occur?

 

Well I install new programs and uninstall old ones all the time so I honestly cant remember what software had been installed but I do remember it just started randomly one day. Didnt think anything of it because it didnt happen too often and then it started getting worse. Lately after doing all the malware scans it has gotten better to where it only does it every few days or so now which is nice but the fact that it still does it is what concerns me. I did what plodr said a day ago and have yet for it to restart or give me the BSOD so just kinda waiting around on that to see where to go from there.

 

So even having turned off auto reboot, my explorer.exe crashed and restarted and I never got the BSOD. So I am back to square one with having no freaking clue as to why its still doing it. It is def a lot more random and doesnt happen nearly as often as it used to but I am still looking for a solution to fix it completely now, so anything else you guys got would be great!

 

Well I know its not the heat factor because that happened to my computer about a year ago and I bought a cooling system for it and has been golden since then. I am going to try that tool you sent me and go from there, ill post the results and everything once I get a chance to run it. Thanks for the help so far man

 

So I ran Memtest and it found no errors so memory isn't the problem. Checked my capacitors and they look normal so it shouldn't be dealing with that or any other heating problem. If my RAM is going bad would Memtest have discovered that or is there another type of test I need to run to figure that out? Or do I do what that link said and replace the RAM one by one...dont really want to do that esp if it doesnt help the problem? Thanks again for the help so far!

 

Thanks for trying to help man, I really appreciate it. Anyone else have any other ideas considering I still havent figured this out?