'puter died - had to rebuild need help

[Steve H]

Yesterday my mother board overheated.......................this was a 4+ year old computer. The smae mother board is not available so I went with a new Asus P5GC-MX. The old two gig of RAM were replaced, the processor was replaced and the graphich boad was replaced. IE 7 was reinstalled ' cause we were having a hard time (4+hours) getting the updates to installed. Once the reinstall of IE 7 was done the updates were a snap. NOW THE two problmes left are driving me NUTS: 1 - I need to reactivate Microsoft Office due to the new hardware and it will not connect to Microsoft to do the reactivation and I do not have a phone # to call them, so I cannot edit any of those files. Problem #2 - When I open the "MY MUSIC" folder I get a Windows Explore "problem" message and the folder closes. If I ignore the message I can play music (with Media Player 10). This is all while IE & is NOT running...................I have been working on this for 7 hours and have just about given up.

Any ideas besides dumping Windows and going to a Mac?

[Steve H]

Microsoft just let me connect and reactivate!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now how do I get the error message to go away when I open "MY MUSIC"???????

[OverThereTooMuch]

There are several suggestions in this very long thread:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1061425126

Other tips:
http://www.technipages.com/xp-windows-explorer-crashes-when-opening-folder-with-corrupted-video-files.html

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/techfiles/explorer-crashes.html

The common themes I was able to find in these threads are that corrupted image/video files could be causing this problem. Another suggestion is that it could be a bad shell extension causing problems. 3rd link explains what this is in detail, and gives some great advice for tracking this down.

Only thing I can think of based off the info you provided is that maybe the uninstall/reinstall of IE caused a problem for one of these extensions. When you find the one causing you problems, you'll likely have to do an uninstall/reinstall of that application to get it working correctly again.

[TheGreatLogan]

also the music problem can be created by the same windows media player, did you know that when you burn a cd with windows, they track it, or something like that, so, only you, and nobody else uses it, this is to stop piracy, but not every time works as expected. maybe you can check that.

[LarryFlowers]

You have just been nailed by Digital Rights Management.

I went throught the same thing when I replaced a motherboard a week or so ago. There are a number of "suggested" solutions that you can find by Googling the problem, but none of them worked for me.

Sad thing to say, but when you replace a motherboard, the smart move is to do a clean install of the OS.

I lost Zune and Windows Media Player.