For a while now, whenever I right-click on an item in Windows 7’s Explorer, Explorer would crash a few seconds afterward. I searched around on the web, and the majority of the posts I found suggested a bad context menu handler.

So, I downloaded Autoruns, unzipped it an ran it. I selected the Explorer tab, and systematically disabled each context menu entry until the crash stopped. The culprit? A buggy nvshext.dll installed as part of my latest NVIDIA driver upgrade. I disabled this context menu handler in Autoruns, enabled the others, and now Explorer works again.

A search on nvshext.dll found a description of this issue on Nirsoft’s site.

There’s nothing like the smell of the first post of a new blog.

Some background. For a long while, I was using RapidWeaver to manage my personal blog. I don’t carry my Mac around as much as I used to, and I’m much more cross-platform than I was when I started dmdavis.net. Because of this, I hadn’t updated the site in almost a year. Plus, it had become a hodge podge of family, gaming, tech, and general interest stuff.

In a word: unfocused.

After setting up WordPress for my wife Shelly to use as a diary about raising our daughter, Sophia, I decided it was high time I got back into it. I figured I should probably separate out the tech stuff from the family stuff on the old site. Thus, I present to you insomnihack, a holding place for my idle musings on programming and technology for when I’m too awake to sleep and too tired to code.

I rather hope we both stick around for a while.