I generally use IE4's Windows Desktop Update if only to be able to single-click icons, although I especially enjoy the document thumbnail previews in Explorer folders, available with its Web View feature.
While I'm careful to set the Desktop and each IE4 instance to run in separate processes so one bad web site won't bring down my desktop (or other IE4 instances), sometimes it's the desktop that goes down - or needs to go down, like when an Explorer window won't close, and starts leaking kernel memory all over the place.
Explorer could crash without Active Desktop running, of course, but there's a Registry setting that allows it to recover very nicely, so that you might not even notice it crashed.
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HKLM \Software \Microsoft \WindowsNT \Current Version \Winlogon \AutoRestartShell=0x1
But that setting is basically garbage with Active Desktop running, because although Explorer can still close down and restart itself, you get that Active Desktop Recovery page blanketing your desktop, which requires you to stop what you're doing and select "restore Active Desktop" if you want your Desktop back.
Before Active Desktop, I would routinely stop the explorer.exe process when necessary (i.e., to make changes go into effect without rebooting, for instance). Suffice it to say that it's no longer a "routine," since ending that process kills Active Desktop and all your carefully-crafted Web View folder settings.
NTFAQ.COM's IE4 page says that you can skip the Recovery page by deleting the "Desktop.htt" file in \Profiles \{username} \Application Data \Microsoft \Internet Explorer. However, no matter how many different ways I tried (i.e., refreshing the desktop after deleting the file, deleting all the files in that folder, or even rebooting after deleting the files), the file kept self-regenerating. And for good reason: it is an automatically regenerating file. Even spookier, the library file that supposedly handles it (according to the file itself), "deskhtml.dll," is non-existant.
No great loss, really: getting rid of the Recovery page wouldn't help with the problem of losing your folders' Web View settings - they all revert back to default with or without the Recovery page's existence after Active Desktop crashes.
Solution? Leave Windows Desktop Update on your system (so you can continue to use Web View for your folders), but turn off Active Desktop (using the Desktop's context menu: select Active Desktop, then deselect "View as Web Page"). Without Active Desktop enabled, explorer.exe can die the most horrible of deaths, but you'll both keep your folder settings and avoid the hated Recovery page after restarting explorer.exe.
