Comments on: Tips of How to Take Effect After Installation Without Restarting Windows XP/Vista

By: How to Kill Windows Explorer Processes Easily in Windows Vista » My Digital Life

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:13:40 +0000

[...] for Explorer.exe under Processes tab, then right clicking on it and select End Process, or using Taskkill command. This actually involves few steps in killing only a single Explorer.exe. If you have multiple [...]

By: TheWindowsFix

TheWindowsFix — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:23:38 +0000

I have to agree with Razor on this one. This may work in certain situations, but if this was true, we would have heard about it long before.

By: Razor

Razor — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:37:49 +0000

This article is, quite frankly, bad advice. Killing explorer.exe merely is killing the front-end shell to Windows. This does not shutdown and restart the many kernel-mode executables, services and drivers that are generally involved in the type of installations and changes requiring a restart.

There simply is not a way to shut down those without doing a true restart.

By: John

John — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:54:04 +0000

There is a hidden GUI in Windows XP/Vista (who knows why MS decided to keep it hidden) to restart Explorer.

jeff’s WebLog : how to cleanly start and stop explorer.exe:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/07/22/191636.aspx

Restart Explorer.exe process cleanly in Windows Vista:
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/how-to-terminate-and-restart-explorerexe-process-cleanly/

By: Noz

Noz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:21:22 +0000

That was “Did you find…” I’m not English as you can read!

By: Noz

Noz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:19:50 +0000

Did you found that one with 2001’s google? =)
Really old tip but a reminder never hurts.
It also works with some registry modifications affecting the explorer, the desktop,…

By: Dams

Dams — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:21:00 +0000

Be careful, some tray icons may disappear by restarting explorer.exe !