source: https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/9924/info

Microsoft Windows Explorer for Windows XP has been reported to be prone to a remote denial of service vulnerability.

This issue is due to a failure of the application to properly validate user-supplied input via the 'shell:' command. The 'shell:' command is a parameter that a user can specify when including a URI in an HTML tag. This command allows the HTML script to potentially execute any program specified after the 'shell:' command.

Successful exploitation of this issue would cause the affected application to crash, denying service to legitimate users.

The issue may be triggered when a user follows an HTML link formatted like so:
<a href=shell:windows\\system32\\calc.exe>link</a>

This issue may be triggered when a user views an HTML document containing the following tag:
<iframe src=shell:windows\\system32\\calc.exe></iframe>