Restart Explorer Download
Liv Mathenia
Whenever you're facing issues with the Windows user interface, for example, your taskbar isn't responding, or the file navigation seems slow, restarting the Windows Explorer process can often fix the issue.
By doing this, you're basically hitting the reboot button for the graphical user interface without having to shut down or restart your PC. Here, we'll be taking a look at four unique ways to restart File Explorer in Windows 10.
Your desktop will go black, and the taskbar will disappear for a split second, confirming that the Windows Explorer process has rebooted in your system. After the restart, the interface will likely feel more responsive if you were facing slowdowns.
Do you like to have more control when you restart File Explorer? Maybe you don't want to immediately restart it because you're testing something out on your computer, and you want it to use as few resources as possible.
We'll use two separate commands to kill the Explorer.exe process and start it back up in this particular method. It's a manual way to restart File Explorer, just like the previous method.
Now that you've learned not one but four different ways to restart File Explorer, it's time to find your favorite method for once. If you're looking for the fastest method, you have a clear winner here. But, if you don't want to set up a batch file for it, you can always go for the popular Task Manager technique.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager, then right-click Windows Explorer and select "Restart" to restart Windows Explorer. On Windows 7, 8, or 10, you can also right-click the taskbar while holding Ctrl+Shift and select "Exit Explorer" to restart Windows Explorer.
If your taskbar, system tray, or Start menu acts up, you might be tempted to restart your PC. Instead, you can usually just restart Windows Explorer. Windows makes it pretty easy whether you're using Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7.
The "Process" tab of the Task Manager window shows you apps and background processes currently running on your PC. Scroll down the list of what's running and find "Windows Explorer." If you currently have a File Explorer window open, you'll see it right near the top in the "Apps" section. Otherwise, you'll find it toward the bottom of the "Background Processes" section. To restart, just select "Windows Explorer" and then click the "Restart" button.
That's all you should have to do. It may take a few seconds and things like your taskbar and Start menu may disappear momentarily, but when it restarts, things should behave better and you can exit Task Manager.
Windows 7 doesn't offer a simple restart command like Windows 8 and 10 do. Instead, you'll have to end the process and then restart it as two separate steps. Right-click any empty area of the taskbar and choose "Task Manager."
Your taskbar and notification area (as well as any open File Explorer windows) should disappear from view. Sometimes, Windows will restart the process automatically after a minute or so, but it's easiest just to go ahead and restart it yourself. In the Task Manager window, click the "File" menu and then click "New Task (Run...)".
There are many ways to restart File Explorer without rebooting for exampe Using Task Manager, Using Command-Prompt or PowerShell or you can hold Ctrl+Shift while right-clicking any empty area of the taskbar
I have a deployment package that wraps a third party application installer. It is primarily a giant Powershell script, but open to any other possibilities. The vendor installer had the potential in the past to screw up and take out explorer as collateral damage. I'd like my script to start explorer in case this happens, but I'm a bit concerned this might create an explorer instance as the local SYSTEM account, which would be bad.
How can I be sure it's spawning under the logged in user (ie Session ID 1, if it exists?). I just discovered the wonderful powers of ServiceUI.exe, but it doesn't work if you provide it session:1 and ask it to start explorer.exe if explorer is dead (exits with code 2). I was debating scheduled tasks, but that gets a bit hairy doing it yourself. I am aware that PSAppDeployToolkit seems to have functions to do this, though I'm already heavily invested in my existing script (developed before I realized AppDeployToolkit was a thing, and I've pretty much duplicated if not extended functionality in that toolkit).
I know the way that explorer itself works is.... strange, so I'm not totally certain what's stopping ServiceUI from starting it on its own, or whether the system account starting explorer is actually indeed starting explorer in the user context (this seeeeeems to be the case, but I'm overly skeptical whether that actually happens 100% of the time)
I need a batch file to stop and restart explorer.exe, but I don't know all the commands needed. I know if you select it from the task manager you can restart it, but I want a file on my desktop I can double-click. I'm using Windows 10 Professional.
I know I can stop explorer.exe (either through the task manager or through the Ctrl-Shift-Right Click on menu / Exit Explorer thing) and restart it through the task manager. That used to work just fine on XP. But on my Windows 7 box it just pops up a file browsing window. No taskbar, no start menu, no desktop.
[Update] I'm not looking for alternative ways to restart explorer. I found plenty of those while Googling for a solution to my problem. I need to know why explorer is not restoring my desktop icons and taskbar after it is restarted.
Just had the same problem. It seems that when you run explorer.exe without full path it starts as C:\windows\explorer.exe /factory,682159d9-c321-47ca-b3f1-30e36b2ec8b9 -Embedding, as you see, with parameters.
The answer was to simply delete the extraneous period at the end of the path and start explorer again. Solved. Such a nice fix. I wonder how it ever got messed up in the first place. MalwareBytes did detect 50+ objects, however, which may have had something to do with it.
I did not want to logout or restart and attempting to launch explorer via new task was not working despite all processes being terminated. The solution for me was to browse to the Windows Directory (C:\Windows) and right click on explorer.exe - run as administrator. ;)
I have a Visual Studio Setup Project that creates an MSI to install my application. My application has a shell extension with a icon overlay handler so explorer.exe needs to be restarted in order for the icon overlay handler to start working. I have registered a custom action to run on commit that restarts explorer using the following method:
Killing the explorer is a bit rough... I suggest you use the Restart Manager API for that. The benefit is Explorer knows how to restart itself, and it will restore all opened windows after the restart. Here is a C# utility class that will do it for you. Just call this in you custom action:
You don't need to use RestartManager or any other trick to force explorer to restart in order to load your overlay handler. Microsoft provides an API to tell explorer to load unloaded overlay extensions.
This is what I am using in my C# shell overlay extensions project and it works (though I only tested it on Windows 11). This will force explorer to load your overlay extension without closing existing windows provided that some overlay icon spots are still available (The max is 15 overlays).
Usually, the process can work without a glitch for a long time, but eventually one or more of its elements could break causing Windows 10 to freeze or stop responding entirely, leaving you unable to open the Start menu or interact with the taskbar or other experiences. When this occurs, most users will just reach for the power button to fix the problem, but it could be an issue that you may be able to resolve by simply restarting the process without the risk of losing unsaved changes.
Once you complete the steps, the process will terminate and restart automatically, fixing common problems, such as when the Start menu won't open or you can't interact with the taskbar or File Explorer.
However, you won't necessarily need to terminate both processes to troubleshoot issues, as ending the Explorer.exe will also automatically reset the new Start process. Just keep in mind that if you end the StartMenuExperienceHost.exe process it won't terminate the Explorer.exe process. Also, unlike Explorer.exe, whether you terminate or restart the process, StartMenuExperienceHost.exe should always start again automatically.
Is there a way to restore all the windows (directories) which the above batch has closed for me?I thought of export all the locations before closing explorer in a .txt file, and then open it again from the same batch file but I haven't tested yet. I'm open to any suggestion.
The "source" problem of this post is "Windows 10 explorer's search doesn't work": -us/windows/forum/all/file-explorer-search-not-working-in-windows-10/3c70ea75-79a8-4f3b-b10a-86be1f22931c(Windows future version will probably solves this issue, so I just hope to learn something from it)
I'm having big troubles with a remote server that for some reason explorer.exe crashed and, although I didn't lose remote desktop connectivity, I can't do anything. Is there a way of restarting explorer without rebooting the server?
Edit: Also, if your remote desktop session is still active, CTRL + ALT + END should have the same effect as a CTRL + ALT + DEL on the remote system. That might get you the Task Manager up, in which case you can kill/restart explorer.exe as required.
CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is a keyboard shortcut for launching the Task Manager. It has "File->New Task..." which is basically a Run dialog that you'd normally get with WINKEY+R, which you can use to restart Explorer by entering "explorer" or "explorer.exe". I have used this shortcut numerous times when explorer has crashed and not restarted.
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