Event ID 1002: The shell stopped unexpectedly and Explorer.exe was restarted.

Now I know a lot of users have reported this problem... but I think that mine is a little different. This is the second time I've posted this, so I hope this gets some attention this time.

I had downloaded this program against my better judgment that edits elements of the start menu (hides/shows various elements, edits sizes) and everything was fine until I went back to it some time later to restore defaults...

Explorer frequently stops and starts in very short periods (10 seconds) and doesn't stop doing this until restart (in some sessions it doesn't occur) or until I manually end explorer in task manager. Also sometimes it stops doing this on its own, only to resume this very annoying activity minutes or hours later. With all cases, there is no error message on-screen; I just see desktop icons, start menu, and any open windows disappear and re-appear.

Someone said this might be a problem with where the start menu is pointing to in the registry? Again, these don't occur as singular events; explorer restarts itself every 10 seconds continuously.