Team Hack-a-Day

I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.

I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with others.

You can see the full process after the jump.

Before we begin, some people have asked why you would want to restart explorer.exe in the first place.  There are times when this can be helpful, such as when Windows refuses to unlock a file you are trying to delete, or if you need to refresh something that has to do with the visual aspect of Windows.  The explorer shell is handles all file and display aspects of Windows, so you may find it helpful to restart explorer.exe when you are in a bind.

Now on to the important stuff!

The first step to restart explorer.exe is to click on Start and select Shut Down. The Windows shut down dialog will appear.

Next, while holding down the Control, Shift, and Alt keys (notice I did not say Ctrl-Alt-Del!) click the Cancel button on the shut down dialog window. This should kill explorer.exe and leave you with no Start menu, task bar, etc.

Now, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Windows task manager. Click File and select New Task (Run…).

This will bring up the Create New Task dialog box. Simply type in explorer.exe to relaunch Windows Explorer.

It has been noted that you can also restart explorer.exe very easily using Sysinternals Process Explorer.

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