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how to cleanly start and stop explorer.exe

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If you are running Windows XP and want a cmd prompt with no strange environment variables set, do the following: CTRL+SHIFT+ESC->File->CTRL+New Task (Run...)
This will open a cmd window with only the basics.  This is useful if you have killed Explorer and need to restart it.  Explorer will keep the environment of the cmd window that started it. 

If you want to cleanly shutdown Explorer without having it automatically restart: Start->Shutdown->CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Cancel.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2004
    Your second tip is wonderfully obscure. Is that by design? For kiosks or security somehow? Are these documented anywhere? I use CTRL+SHIFT+ESC a lot, but didn't know about the second one.

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2004
    It is mainly for people who want to shutdown explorer to test their plug-ins.

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2004
    It is mainly for people who want to shutdown explorer to test their plug-ins.

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2004
    Great tips. Thanks. I use CTRL+SHIFT+ESC->File->New Task (Run...)->explorer.exe to restart explorer if I succeed killing it (pretty hard to do now days, but I do manage).

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2004
    About half of the blogs you link to, do not render correctly on non-IE browsers. What happened to the web-standards?

    Anyway, your blog is very informative and it renders fine in Mozilla Firefox.

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2004
    <humor>The great thing about web standards is you have so many to choose from.</humor>

    Seriously though, I am not sure. I don't admin any of them... I just use the tools Microsoft provides.

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2004
    Excellent post! This is great stuff... one of the MS guys like you could or should write a book about this type of stuff.

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2004
    Heh... You've just experienced the fantastic security built into IE. I suggest switching to Mozilla. You'll find you get far fewer viruses.

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2004
    The string of symbols I referred to are actually the male and female symbols, separate by a dash: <male>-<femaile>-<male>-<femaile>- etc. I did a system report via Norton SystemWorks and it stopped at that point.

    Advice?

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2004
    aren't these blogs aimed at developers? i think you can safely assume they know how to use the task manager

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2004
    I did assume most readers would be familiar with the task manager, which is why I talked about how to cleanly start and stop Explorer, and how to get a cmd window that is free of environment clutter. Thanks for reading!

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2004
    "WHAT??? Does Microsoft think it is replacing the W3C now?"

    Indeed! The alt attribute is REQUIRED on the humor element. You may think it's just meaningless pedantry, but what of your humor impaired visitors? Will you just turn them away? We have standards for a reason!

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2004
    It is normal to sometimes have two instances of explorer.exe. They can run in seperate processes. Depending on the version of Windows and various plug-ins that may or may not be loaded into the Explorer process, it can take up different amounts of memory. How much is it taking?

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2004
    I click on 'my computer' and i get the message 'explorer.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created.' I click OK then my screen flashes. This problem will not go away. Any suggestions?

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    August 21, 2004
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    July 30, 2008
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