Explorer sometimes freezes on 'Recent Documents'

Is this possible you have the locks when there are the shortcuts to the disconnected network drives or to the deleted files?

It's possible there may have been deleted items but I don't think there were any items from disconnected network drives.

However while starting to make this reply I had an interesting event happen. I was using a different laptop to the one I was using last time. By chance instead of clicking the 'Reply' button I moused over Recent Items in the TLB bar and immediately the bar froze, just like before. The attached screen shot shows how it was when it froze.

The difference is that this machine (Toshiba R500) is running fully-updated Vista Business whereas the other was running XP Pro, and this time there were only seven items in Recent Items. Another difference is that on the R500 the TLB is ‘stand-alone' for toolbars along left, right and top sides of screen and ‘normal TLB (not-stand-alone)’ only for the QuickLaunch bar.

When I moused over the pop-up or the task bar, the cursor changed to Vista's rotating doughnut. Anywhere else on screen the cursor remained active and I could start and use other programs as normal. When I clicked in the task bar a message said Explorer had crashed and at the same time the TLB pop-up became greyed-out.

Before restarting Explorer I opened C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent using DOpus and tried clicking on the seven items showing in the TLB pop-up. I found all opened normally except the two pdf links. I copied these links to desktop and when I clicked on the copies a message said they referred to deleted items.

At this point I clicked on the Task Bar and accepted to restart Explorer. TLB then worked normally again. I then copied the two dead links back into C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent but TLB still worked properly. Clicking on the dead links in TLB is now just the same as when I click on them within \Windows\Recent - nothing happens at all.

As a final test I restored the two deleted files back to the Desktop from the Recycle Bin and deleted them again. TLB worked fine before and after with no Explorer crash.

So the conclusions seem to be:

1. The problem occurs in both Vista and XP.
2. Although on this occasion in Vista there were deleted files in Recent Items, this seems to have been only coincidental.

In case it helps I've attached a screenshot of the Vista 'Problem Report' for this event.