Windows Explorer tip

I wanted to share a little tip I learned many years ago - how to unload Windows Explorer without exiting Windows. This might seem like an odd thing to want to do, but over the years I've found reasons why. Maybe Windows Explorer has locked a file that I want to delete, or maybe Explorer has a USB flash drive locked and won't let me eject it (this seems to happen a lot), or maybe there's a serious memory leak in Explorer and you need the process to free all that memory. As a developer I've found reasons why I need to take Explorer out of the picture when debugging a problem in my code. So there are reasons to want to unload Windows Explorer. But typically when you exit Windows Explorer, Windows itself exits.

This tip is pretty easy. You need to bring up the "Shut Down Windows" dialog. You can do this by clicking Start then Shut Down. You can also click on your desktop then press Alt+F4. Once you see the "Shut Down Windows" dialog press and hold Ctrl+Shift+Alt then click the cancel button. Windows Explorer will disappear but Windows will not exit.

After you're done you can reload Explorer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc at the same time. This will bring up Task Manager. From Task Manager you can run a new task of "explorer.exe" This will reload Windows Explorer and you can resume where you left off.