Killing Internet Explorer without Rebooting
The primary client site where I'm working these days has several internal apps that are IE only. Whether that's good or bad is irrelevant. The fact that I have to use them is. Unfortunately, one of these uses an ActiveX control that crashes IE on such "rare" events as your session timing out. Other reasons seem to include mostly, "just because". Unfortunately, due to the tight integration of IE into Windows, having it crash usually means that you have to reboot. I've been getting around that for years, but based on the number of people who seem surprised when I show them my basic technique, I figured I'd share it here.
- Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer (the file manager) are tied together at a really low level.
- When IE crashes, it takes down your start menu, taskbar, etc. along with it.
- IE often leaves an explorer.exe process running, even though all visible remnants are gone.
- That remaining process holds on to any ActiveX controls that were loaded (even if corrupt).
- So, the idea is to kill any remaining explorer.exe processes and start a new one as our shell.
So, how do you do that?
- Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and choose the "Processes" tab.
- Find explorer.exe in the list and hit "End Process"
- In the same box, go to File->Run and type "explorer.exe" and hit enter.
That should give you a completely fresh Windows shell and a clean environment for starting Internet Explorer again. You will have lost any open file manager sessions, but the rest of your software will still be up and you won't lose the 10 minutes of starting your machine up and getting back to the same state you were in before the crash.
