Windows Explorer (or File Explorer) is a file management program providing a graphical user interface for accessing your file systems. It was introduced with Windows 95, Windows Explorer used frequently to browse your PC for files and folders.There are many instances where you need to reboot your PC. It could be that you’ve installed updates, installed a new software or may be your computer just hung up. All this scenarios usually need a system restart. Small issues (Windows explorer freezes , you can not delete some files…) could be taken care of by just restarting Windows explorer.
Restart Explorer v1.6 – (Wednesday, November 24, 2021)
[FIXED] – Conflict with 7-zip
[ADDED] – Some code improvements
There are many ways to restart File Explorer without rebooting for exampe Using Task Manager, Using Command-Prompt or PowerShell or you can hold Ctrl+Shift while right-clicking any empty area of the taskbar
On the modified context menu, click the “Exit Explorer” command but all of these methods have their downsides. Therefore we have coded a small portable Application to restart windows Explorer (File Explorer). Restart Explorer has no GUI , usage is very simple just clik on it and it will restart File explorer.
The difference of this software from others is ; if you open my computer, control panel, recycle bin… folder (which do not have a normal address) and restart windows explorer, open window will not come back with “Restart explorer” these open windows can be restored, It has also Command prompt support, to see all the supported parameters use “Rexplorer.exe /?” command.
You can use it not only for restart File explorer. It can also be used for Refresh Windows explorer and Rebuild Icon cache.
Supported operating systems: Windows 11 , Windows 10 , Windows 8.1 , Windows 8 , Windows 7 , Windows Vista , Windows Xp – (x86 & x64)
File: Rexplorer_x64.exe │ Virustotal
MD5: 50084263a1fcb012c2b4c9e91857c92f
SHA1: 61767b0965a46e7d7a6a21295f60d44efca540b6
File: Rexplorer.exe │ Virustotal
MD5: be4c4f60bba9f07ed80b47506017a0ac
SHA1: e05423363c83fc3924847d968628b716777d825e
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Hi , Thanks for your comment. For the command line we can add the wait parameter.
Very nice and helpful tool. I’d love to see an option to call an external program or command-line script between closing and restarting explorer, though! With this Option it would be possible e.g. to delete sticky files that are blocked by the running explorer.exe. On a regular basis I call a script that first kills explorer.exe, then deletes sticky files, then restarts explorer. Downside is: previously opened explorer-windows don’t come back with this approach. Sordum’s "Restart Explorer" would come very handy at this point, but unfortunately, there’s no option to call progs/commands in between /while running RExplorer. Probably even only an option to pause the restart of explorer.exe for a couple of seconds would be helpful, so one could seize the time to send some scripted commands before explorer.exe restarts.
Do you think this might be a future option?
Best Regards!
Dear Johan,
Some icons in the system tray disappear because there is a problem with the design of those programs, which is not related to the "Restart Explorer" project.
For example, it will happens on "neat download manager" and "fscapture running as an admin".
The result of restarting the explorer using the task manager is the same.