I have seen this in XP...
according to my experience this happens on some xvid/divx avi file types(explorer always crashes for those perticular files). This happends after the DEP option is set to exclude explorer(other wise 1st the DEP error is shownand then explorer crashes anyway, and i dont rem if win2000 has DEP or not). When explorer has to access the file for whatever reason or u hover/click mouse over an avi file , explorer tries to access the file to obtain info like video length, codec, artist etc to show in a tooltip, status bar and details pane. Sometimes explorer crashes when it cannot obtain the information and some memory exception is caused due to misaligned info in the avi file. Though the file works perfect in players.
There is a MS hotfix for this but i cant seem to find it right now...
BTW temperary solution is to rename the file to someother file extension(eg avi1 or something) so that explorer doesnt attempt to obtain that info and thus not crash. Then u can assign that extension to ur player.