A thermal pad but no heatsink probably is the reason for the high temp, but I don’t think it’s the reason for the crash as that’s way too specific, and why on earth would Windows start fine with an overheating M.2 drive and the only symptom is explorer crashing.
I just noticed that C1 suggested safe mode already, I’m not trying to steal other peoples’ suggestions
What graphics driver are you using? What other drives do you have plugged in, try losing all of those. Do you have other software installed that integrates into Windows Explorer in any way, e.g. OneDrive/Dropbox, compression software, VLC, anything that adds explorer context menu options for example.