Explorer.exe And Other Apps Crash Due To Some Error

my toshiba laptop was working fine. then a few days ago one of my games gave me a regular error during the start "game.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close." when i clicked 'click here' it displayed some info including "modname:msvcr71.dll". i thought maybe that game had somehow gone corrupt and i reinstalled it. the error did not go away and i was unable to play my game. then suddenly explorer.exe started giving me the same message with the same msvcr71.dll listed as modname. in both cases, the error message says that the following file will be included in the report and then some appcompat.txt in some temp folder. this file was unique everytime but the phrase appcompat.txt was constant. also when i tried to find this file in the specified location i found that it did not exist. i cannot understand what triggers the error, it occurs totally randomly, but i have to be dragging a file icon.

when the error message is displayed, the system does not stop and i can choose to ignore the message for as long as i want, everything is fine. when i click close the explorer restarts.also, recently i got similar errors from vlc player when i tried to play a wmv file in slow motion. this error message also lists msvcr71.dll as mod name.then another game started giving me the same problem with the same modname msvcr71.dll.i cant make any sense of all this.