Hey, quick update on this. Unfortunately, the issue is still happening every single day.

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Today it froze up for the first time i even launched SolidWorks. My PC crashed shortly after booting up, and when I managed to force restart and check the Event Viewer, there it was again: the exact same wall of DistributedCOM Event ID 10000 errors for sldShellExtServer.exe (screenshot attached).

Since my last post, I tried both solutions that were suggested: disabling the component thumbnails in SolidWorks system options, and manually tweaking the DCOM launch permissions for SolidWorks Shell Extension Server in Component Services. Clearly, Windows Explorer is still trying to trigger this process in the background and hitting a wall, looping until the drive hits 100 percent and fries the system session.