How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

George — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:26:32 GMT

Hey man. Thanks so much. My volume icon had disappeared. When I went to turn the icon on in the Taskbar properties menu, the "volume" box was grayed out. After using this method, the check box was accessible (no longer grayed) again. Big help.

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

iPath — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:10:01 GMT

Correction: the trick with "explorer.exe /separate" actually works ONLY on Windows XP/Windows Server 2003

Thanks for your corrective comment

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

iPath — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:40:56 GMT

Other nice trick: explorer.exe /separate

This will start explorer.exe as SEPARATE process (separate from the shell i.e. just as file manager).

And elevation is simple (without logout/logon):

runas /user:domainName\userName "explorer.exe /separate"

[Aaron Margosis] I wish people would actually test their brilliant ideas before they post them to my blog, or perhaps read my previous posts that cover these issues. Someone's going to read what "iPath" wrote and think it actually works.

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

Joe Federer — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:11:02 GMT

This doesn't work in windows 7. It starts the explorer process under the logged-in user (ie: non-elevated).

Like the person above me, I can't for the life of me get an elevated explorer window (and we all know how useful that is in ACTUALLY administering a users machine) without focing the user to log off and logging in as an administrative account.

Is it just me or is this going backwards and counter to the whole ethos of least privleges?

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

Bob L — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:48:14 GMT

Unfortunately Windows 7 seems to have changed the rules a bit. Nothing I have found and tried so far seems to get Windows Explorer to run with administrator rights turned on.

Has anyone figured out a way to get Windows Explorer in Windows 7 to run with admin rights?

Thanks!

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

bells — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:44:31 GMT

Please help!

I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium, on a Compaq Presario F500 laptop, with an AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. Only had it a couple of weeks. I'm a complete n00b.

When I try to move files or delete to recycle bin, all the windows (usually "Calculating time remaining") freeze and wont disappear on their own. The task is complete, but I still I have to open Task Manager and end the task manually. This happens every time.

I have tried defrag, scanning and disk cleaners, all to no avail.

There is an easy fix to this, I expect, but as a n00b, I'm not that techy yet.

Any, simple to understand, advice would be appreciated.

Cheers.

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

mike g — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:51:44 GMT

aaron...i have had a lot of experience & exasperation with xp...new toshiba w/vista home premium preloaded...3+ months now & am still encountering problems w/vista...latest was following an auto download from windows, & got in a never-ending loop saying it was in stage 3 of update & don't turn off the computer...subsequent to system restart my icons etc. went missing...previously i was able to use trayicons.reg to recapture...not this time....after several days & many attempts i finally reached success with your solution...can't thank you enough man...why is it that explorer gets so lost ???...by the way, before trying your solution i created a new user & the new user had icons that i as admin could not turn on !!!...thanks again!!!

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

Brian — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:38:16 GMT

Aaron, I have tried this and I do get the shell to open as an admin acct but I still cannot open network shares that require elevated access. Any thoughts?

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

anonymous — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:28:23 GMT

I wonder where your problem with the shell extensions is. The Explorer shell itself already is trivially vulnerable, so there's no reduction in security.

[Aaron Margosis] In the context of this post... there is a difference between security vuln running as a standard user vs. running as admin...

re: How to cleanly stop Explorer.exe on Windows Vista

Vlitist — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:27:30 GMT

Do you happen to have the rundll command to achieve this? I'd like to script it because tskill and pskill only kill explorer for a second and then it auto restarts.