Windows 7/Vista: Batch File for Restarting Explorer.exe

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.

Or download the file here: RestartExplorer.bat

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