Lately whenever I have been looking at pictures on my computer, my computer would close the program (the Windows and Fax viewer). It doesn't come up with an error message though....It is very annoying and I am not sure what is causing it...I tried doing a system restore to a point of about a week ago, but it didn't help (although it did at first). Any ideas?

I had this problem with video files (.mpgs) it took ages to work out, there was a video codec on my system called Citrix video codec, once I removed that all was well. Is XP confused about which program should be opening that type of image?

Check the Event Log (Via Control Panel - Admin Tools - Event Viewer) for any errors there ,as error reporting to the user may be off.

it still does this..I tried looking in the event viewer and it says "Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2800.1221, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 5.1.2600.1217, fault address 0x0000852f". It only does it when I use the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

hasn't anyone has a problem like this before? any idea what exactly 'ntdll.dll' is?

I know that with video files at least, windows makes DLL calls to "analyze" them to generate "multimedia" info for various explorer columns, some of which might even not be currently active. If the file is corrupted/truncated, and the decoder for that particular video file doesn't handle this well, it can really slow down and/or crash explorer.exe.

Something similar might be happening with the pictures.

I've noted that now that I have iView set to be my standard app under XP and 2K for viewing/editing pics, all the previews generated have the iview logo stamped on them.

That's evidence that the 2K/XP preview function is calling the "owner" of the file type to do the processing.

Perhaps the owner of the image file types in question is having problems with some of the images?