Reply #3: Found the culprit [View All]

[Hokie]

It was the Dell Wireless LAN Utility. The first file I restored was bcmwlcpl.cpl and that caused it to crash again. After doing a search I found this:

Control Panel Crashing While Loading WLAN Utility
04 Aug 2009 11:23AM

On 64 bit Windows Vista Home Premium, the Control Panel will crash during the first time it's opened, Windows Explorer will not respond and is restarted, after that, the Control Panel will load fine until the computer is rebooted.

This behaviour is also observed on 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate.

I've noticed that during the crash, one icon would not show up, which is the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility. I suspected Control Panel has trouble loading this item. The file for this item is BCMWLCPL.CPL

If you remove BCMWLCPL.CPL from the C:/Windows/System32 folder, the control panel will not crash. This file is the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility.

If you experience a similar issue, I suggest you move the file BCMWLCPL.CPL to another location and edit the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility shortcut provided in your Start Menu to point to the new location.

Dell, please see why Control Panel crashes when loading this file and fix it via an update or patch.

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19287843/19529825.aspx