How to: Start and kill explorer

Cool tips & tricks and tutorials to tune your boring old Windows XP

29 May 2008 935 views 4 Comments

You might need to kill explorer if it stops responding. You would probably open up Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del) or even restart if you were really dumb. The clean way to close explorer is like this:

Go to Start > Turn Off Computer and hold Ctrl + Alt + Shift and press Cancel.

The start bar and desktop will disappear. To start explorer again and get them back, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to bring up the Task Manager, click New task and type explorer. Press enter to run it.

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4 Comments »

wisher said:

On Vista (I don’t know if this trick works also with XP) there is a clean way to kill explorer.
Open the start menu and hit CTRL+SHIFT+right mouse button on a empty space of the menu.
It will appear the EXIT EXPLORER option.

# 29 May 2008 at 9:38 pm

How to kill any proccess via command prompt | Cool Windows XP tricks, tutorials and software reviews. (author) said:

[...] WordPress.org ← How to: Start and kill explorer [...]

# 30 May 2008 at 6:43 am

Eerik said:

@ wisher

It doesn’t work with XP.

# 30 May 2008 at 6:47 am

wisher said:

I’m sorry, seems you’ve to upgrade to Vista

wisher’s last blog post..Brand new Google icon, trouble coming?

# 31 May 2008 at 10:56 am

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