What does the shellexplorer.exe process do? (Windows XP)

Sometimes my system slows to a crawl. I press control-alt-delete and I see that shellexplorer.exe is taking 99% of my system resources. I just killed it today to see what would happen and my computer seemed to go back to normal. I have anti-spyware and anti-virus and a firewall and all that good stuff. Anyone have an idea?

 

That does not seem to be a standard part of XP. See if you can locate it in your registry or on the hard drive, looking at properties to determine its source.

I checked the windows process library and did not find it.
http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/

I googled on it and found only 5 references, none in english.

My guess is that it is part of some software you installed. Should be possible to get rid of it once you figure out how it starts up.

 

With a poorly trnaslated site:

http://translate.google.com/transla...llexplorer.exe&hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en

It appears it could be a trojan.

 

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

Please go through this thread.

 

I downloaded a nifty program called security task manager by Neuber. It is a kind of an anti-malware for the task manager. It provides some information about all your processes and lets you solve the problem of bad processes. I quarantined the shellexplorer process, so it won't be starting up at boot again. Thanks everyone for your posts.