explorer.exe crash upon opening certain folders

(Whoops - sorry about premature post!)

I recently bought a Dimension 8300 preinstalled with Windows XP Home. Other than taking it out of the box and installing Photoshop 6, the only other thing I have done is copy the data from my old hard drive (an older Dell Domension with Windows 98) onto my new computer.

*MY PROBLEM*  Whenever I open up certain folders, the folder begins to open...I start to see icons inside... but then it crashes with one of several Explorer.exe errors. (Sometimes with references to shlwapi.dll or nt.dll or urlmon,dll;  sometimes with errors stating "The memory could not be "read" (or "written") ... The instruction at ... references memory at ..."; and sometimes with errors stating that "the exception unknown software exception...")  All folder close, and I start again at the desktop. I can't get to my files!

If I open the same folder burned to a CD, it opens fine.

If I move the folder to the desktop, or to the root directory of the hard drive, the folder opens just fine. If I move it back into a subfolder, it refuses to open again. Copying the folder, renaming the folder, etc. does not help.

I have narrowed the problem down to certain folder containing TIF files, made in Photoshop on my old machine. But only certain files. And only if the files are in a subdirectory.

I could circumvent this problem by never using subdirectories, and keeping all my folders on my desktop or root directory, but that would be a giant headache.

I ran sfc/scannow with no results.

Help!