WIndows 7 - Exporer Crashing

Over the past weekend my computer died. Not a noble death but a long excruciatingly painful death. Out of the blue, the computer shut down. When I rebooted, it took forever to boot up, approximately 15 mins. It did a checkdsk and found some bad sectors, They must have been important, because once booted up, I continuously got a failure on explorer. It would fail and need to be restarted. Every 30 secs or so.  So after a couple of hours trying to solve the issue I decided it was time to reload windows. I removed the system hard drive and replaced with one I had but wasn't using. I installed Windows 7 on the new old disk and all is well again. Except I have to reload all my software. Fortunately I have my financial info, photos, and music on another disk. What a pain. But at least it was fixable. I wasn't ready to buy anything new.