I got this same exact problem today. The computer booted fin this morning and I did not do anything noteworthy with the system. This evening it wouldn't open explorer.exe.
I reverted back to my week old backup (full system image), it would boot fine, then as soon as it updated the virus detection database, avast wouldn't let explore.exe open. I tried to scan my month old backup of explorer.exe, Avast still detects Win64:dropper-gen.
I figured it's one of two things:
- I've been running the virus all this time and only now has avast! started detecting it
- it's a false positive
I used a couple of other scanners (including combofixer), none detect a problem with explorer.exe, so I whitelisted it. Everything seems perfect.
I'm starting to thing I did a bad move coming back to avast... It let me down once, many years ago, and no, fortunately, it didn't let my system get infected, but I'm not too happy about this.