How can I restart my taskbar?

Question

Occasionally the clock in the notification area of the taskbar stops working. If I hover over it I can see the analog clock view is correct but the digital readout is frozen. Today I tried to hide the clock and then re-show it but that seems to have made things worse. The icons in the rest of the task bar are shifted over and clicking on them doesn't seem to bring the correct window to focus. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad with some wireless connection and system update software installed that takes over some of the taskbar which may contribute to these problems.

If I log out of Windows or restart my machine, everything seems to be fine for awhile. However that means I need to close down everything I am working on, restart, etc.

Is there a way to restart the taskbar without exiting Windows? I know Windows does this occasionally when the taskbar stops responding but is there a way that I can force it to happen?

Answer 1

Open the start menu and then Ctrl+Shift+Right-click in any blank space above, around or on the "Shutdown" button will bring up an option to "Exit Explorer" as shown:

I originally found this on HowToGeek and have used it in Vista for the last year. It results in a much more graceful closure of Explorer without actually logging you out.

You will still need to open Task Manager in order to launch Explorer again though, Alex's answer details how you can quickly bring up the task manager to relaunch Explorer.

The same can be done on Windows 8 by doing the same action on the taskbar instead (thanks to Karl in the comments). This is presumably as the Start button is now missing.

Answer 2

A quick and dirty way to restart the taskbar is to simply kill and restart the explorer process.

Ctrl+Shift+Esc go to the processes tab and look for explorer.exe. End the process, and select File > New Task (Run...). Enter explorer.exe into the field (specifically the filename "explorer.exe", you do not need to enter the full path and it may not work properly if you do), accept, and your taskbar will re-appear.

Answer 3

You could also create a batch file to automate it.

1. From the start menu type notepad then press enter.

2. Type the following in the new notepad.

   taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
   start explorer.exe
   

3. Save the file as fixTaskbar.bat and save it on your desktop (or somewhere else easy to access).

When ever it has issues, you can simply double click on this file and it will restart it automatically.

Answer 4

It can be done without creating a batch file, in a single command issued in the Run window (Windows+R) or in the Command Prompt (cmd.exe).

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe && start explorer.exe

It will terminate (end task) Windows Explorer (explorer.exe process) and then, if it's successfully terminated, will start it again.

Answer 5

Try restarting explorer.exe in any event of crashing of your desktop appearance. Kill explorer.exe from your task manager (assuming you are able to access it). Then start it again (new task option in task manager). By this way you don't need to restart the PC.

Answer 6

I sometimes notice that my taskbar occasionally freezes graphically too. This particular fix works for me:

Restart the Desktop Window Manager service. This can be done via services.msc, or type in net stop uxsms and net start uxsms in an elevated command prompt.

Answer 7

You could also do this from a python script:

import os
from time import sleep

os.system("taskkill /f /im explorer.exe")  
sleep(3)
os.system("start C:\Windows\explorer.exe")

Note: you have to supply the full path: C:\Windows\explorer.exe otherwise it opens a folder window instead of restoring the taskbar.

Answer 8

None of the answers above really helped. My task bar was gone, and I needed a keyboard based solution to get the taskbar back. What I ended up doing was:

A) Use CTRL-ALT-DELETE and select the task manager.

B) Use File->New Task(Run...) and enter explorer.exe

Your task bar should be back.