Windows XP/Vista: Use a Batch File for Quickly Restarting explorer.exe

Contributor Icon Contributed by shamanstears Date Icon February 22, 2008  
Tag Icon Tagged: Batch file programming

Explorer.exe is the user shell on your Windows system (taskbar, desktop, etc.) and periodically it requires a restart to resume proper functionality. Additionally, if you do a lot of tweaking to your system registry like I do, it’s much easier to restart explorer.exe to reload the registry instead of restarting the entire system. By creating a .bat file, you will have a quick 2 step solution that will restart explorer.exe and get you back to computing in just a few seconds.


1. Open Notepad.

2. Copy and paste the following into the new document:@echo off
taskkill /f /IM explorer.exe
explorer.exe
3. Save your document with a descriptive name such as restart_explorer.bat. Make sure to save the file with the .bat extension and not .txt.

The next time you need to restart explorer.exe, simply run the newly created .bat file and close the command window that appears.

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  • FloJo
    Or Task Manager > Applications > New Task > explorer.exe
  • ernie1066
    Ran batch file and it now opens the "Windows Explorer" instead of restarting "Explorer" (desktop). It used to restart Explorer as described in your post. I checked the batch file and it is exactly the same as copied from you post. Any suggestions?
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