Sunday, September 02, 2007

What do you do when explorer disappears?


First time I've had it happen in Vista, hope it doesn't happen too often (or ever again). When explorer.exe quit, the first thing I did was minimize all the windows and hit "print screen" because it looked so weird without any icons or task bar and start menu. The above image is the result.

To get the show back on the road I hit ctrl-alt-del and opened the task manager, then chose File>New Task and typed "explorer.exe" in the box. In a second everything was back to normal.

A lot of people probably already know this, but I reckon a lot of people would also reset when something like this happens. It's probably sensible to reset in order to get everything stable again. In my case I wanted to save the screen dump as an image in my favourite graphics program and blog about my experience. Then as soon as I post this I'm shutting down and going to bed.

2 comments:

Daniel said...

Interesting. It seems like in XP, it understands that if explorer.exe dies, it needs to restart it. Apparently Vista doesn't do this.

Ben said...

Daniel - Exactly, that's what I was expecting to happen, but was surprised when it didn't. Might have to do a bit of digging around to see if this is normal behaviour or not.