explorer crashes

I have the following problem:

I'm usin OO Portable on Windows XP, on the school's network (Novell clients). Sometimes when I start OO - I'd say about one out of two times - the explorer crashes ( not IE, the file explorer), restarts, after a few seconds crashes again, reastarts, and so on. Really annoying!
Now, I know that the bug is in explorer, but maybe somebody knows of a way to avoid this crashes?

Simon