A few days ago I uninstalled Norton with Revo Uninstaller and installed malwarebytes pro. I restarted my computer only to find that approximately every 3 seconds, explorer.exe crashed and restarted. This went on for about 3 days. The event viewer showed the "The Windows Search service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 7864 time(s)" message that I've seen in other threads.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/38a0ac31-501d-4b84-9b75-5d64fd684e10/workaround-windows-search-service-terminated-unexpectedly-faulting-application-searchindexerexe?forum=w7itprogeneral

  Here's what I've done so far.

• ran malwarebytes full system scan - found a few problems but after fixing them the main issues persisted.
• ran sfc/ scannow (7-8 times... found issues at first but now returns the message "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.")
• Set 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\SetupCompletedSuccessfully' from 1 to 0
  
• left computer on overnight (windows explorer still crashing every few seconds)
• hard reset by removing the battery. Now windows explorer won't load at all. (no desktop, no modern UI or Taskbar)
• attempted to rebuild the index, which didn't work.
• Here's the what the event viewer shows

Faulting application name: SearchIndexer.exe, version: 7.0.9600.16384, time stamp: 0x5215d4c4
Faulting module name: PROPSYS.dll, version: 7.0.9600.16504, time stamp: 0x52c84647
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000002e7cf
Faulting process ID: 0x12cc
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf2ce75776bd39
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\SearchIndexer.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\PROPSYS.dll
Report ID: 9558cdec-98da-11e3-bf19-ccaf78ef940c
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

and

Faulting application name: explorer.exe, version: 6.3.9600.16441, time stamp: 0x5265dec8
Faulting module name: PROPSYS.dll, version: 7.0.9600.16504, time stamp: 0x52c84647
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000002e7cf
Faulting process ID: 0x4038
Faulting application start time: 0x01cf2c003f8be4cd
Faulting application path: C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\PROPSYS.dll
Report ID: 7f1c8601-97f3-11e3-bf18-ccaf78ef940c
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I can't run Microsoft's fix it because explorer.exe won't load, so trying to save any installer results in Firefox crashing.

Not really sure what do do at this point.

Edit: did a system restore. returned with an error saying system restore error failed while deleting c:\$MFT\

An unspecified error occurred during system resotre (0x8007007b)

• Edited by Dark Butter Wednesday, February 19, 2014 2:29 AM update

It appears as though propsys.dll is either corrupt or producing the errors you are experiencing. To resolve this issue, you will want to use the System File Checker utility (SFC) to check your system files for errors or corruption. You will need to open an Administrative Command Prompt, for example by right clicking the Start Button and selecting Command Prompt (Admin) from the list of administrative tools. You will then need to enter the following and press enter.

SFC /ScanNow

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
The Springboard Series on TechNet