Do Away With Windows Restart by Cleaning Exiting Explorer.exe

by Keith Dsouza | Translate | Print
Friday, 16th May 2008 | Share




I have been installing quite a lot of softwares and many of those want me to restart the computer so that their changes are applied to the PC.

While browsing my feeds I came across a cool unrelated tip by DailyApps which talked about restarting the Explorer.exe cleanly, in that I saw another cool tip which could allow you to also do away with the boring restart every application demands.

I keep trying variety of registry tricks everyday, and install and uninstall numerous applications that demand a restart whenever I install them. To get away with boring restart process I normally kill Explorer.exe from the task manager and wait for it to restart automagically.

So I believe that cleanly exiting Explorer.exe will mean that I do not have to restart my PC after all, super cool. Here is how to exit explorer.exe cleanly.

Click the Start button. Press and hold the CTRL and SHIFT keys, and right-click on an empty area in the Start menu. You’ll see a Popup menu containing the two options namely Exit Explorer and Properties. Alternatively you could get the above Popup menu by holding the CTRL and SHIFT keys and then right-clicking on the Start menu power button itself.

After selecting the Exit Explorer command, the shell (Start menu, Taskbar and the Desktop) will exit and the other applications will continue to run normally. You need to manually start a new Explorer.exe process by launching Task Manager. Use the CTRL+SHIFT+ESC key sequence to launch Task Manager. From the File menu of Task Manager, choose New Task (Run…), type Explorer.exe and press ENTER.

Excerpt Credit [Daily Apps]

Thanks Daily Apps for this cool tip.

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  1. Rakshit
    May 17th, 2008 at 8:46 am #

    Hey, it didn’t work for me. I get only 1 option “Properties”. That’s it.

    I am using WinXP sp2. May be this technique is meant for some other version of Windows.
    :-(

    Reply to this comment

    Keith Dsouza Reply:

    Hey I guess this does not work in Windows XP, there is a different way you can do it in XP.

    Reply to this comment

  2. Nihar
    October 1st, 2008 at 12:48 pm #

    Thanks for the tip….

    Reply to this comment

  3. PellesReality
    December 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 pm #

    Much easier in Vista to (right click) and open the (Task Manager).

    In the (Processes) tab you (right click) and terminate (explorer.exe).

    Now,in the (Arcive tab) you choose (new activity – run).

    Type (explorer.exe) in the blank field and push OK.

    CLEAN RESTART AND EVERYBODY IS HAPPY.

    Thanks and bye. :)

    Reply to this comment