How To Restart Windows Explorer Shell in Windows xp

by jaswanth (81) on October 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment | 960 views

Restart Windows Explorer: Also known as the shell (desktop) may sometimes freeze, so that it become unresponsive so now we have only option reboot. And while installing some games and softwares after the installation a message reboot your system will comes. No need of restart your system, restart Windows Explorer that’s enough. Instead of rebooting, follow these steps to restart Windows Explorer.

Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE then it opens Task Manager Windows.
Just Click on the Processes tab at the top.
Search for explorer.exe in the Image Name column.
Now Right click on it and select End Process. This will terminate Windows Explorer.
Now Click File from the menu and choose New Task (Run…).
Type as explorer in the Run box then press ok
Then Windows Explorer shell will restart.

One thing you have to remember is you may have more than one Explorer.exe process running be sure to kill all of them, otherwise the new explorer process will not take over the task bar.
More over Goto Microsoft’s site and download Microsoft’s ProcessExplorer – it’s a much better version of Task Manager that gives you more control (e.g. pause a CPU-heavy process without killing it) and more useful information (e.g. see the I/O-heavy processes, see the process hierarchy).

Note: This will works on Windows xp/Vista/Win 7