Saturday, June 4, 2016

How to: Easily fix Windows 10 bugged explorer.exe

I like Windows 10.  For the most part it's a great OS.

However something about it bugs me to no end: explorer.exe

exporer.exe is what runs your task bar.

Mine is set to auto-hide.  Usually, it works.  Sometimes, it gets stuck and it refuses to hide and it's just taking up space on the screen.

The fix is to kill explorer.exe and restart it.

Another thing that it sometimes does, is when it is hiding, it STAYS hidden.  I think it crashed or something, because it never shows itself, the Windows key stops being functional, etc.

Again the fix is to kill explorer.exe and restart it.

I've been doing this manually for a while now, but I'm a developer so it pisses me off to do things manually.

I finally decided to learn PowerShell enough to do this simple task, and wow, I actually really like PowerShell.  Insert expletive here.  Good job Microsoft.

To make your life easier, here is the simple one-liner I made that will kill explorer.exe.  I saved this to a file named "reset.ps1" on my desktop, so now when explorer freaks out, I just right-click this and choose "Run with PowerShell" and voila!  Problem solved.

# Kill the explorer.exe process.
# Windows will automatically restart it. 
Stop-Process (Get-Process explorer).id

Screen-shot of my desktop, just choose "Run with PowerShell" and explorer.exe will be fixed!