Restarting explorer does not restore taskbar

I've been having a really annoying problem with explorer in Windows 7. Sometimes I need to restart explorer, for example to help testing software I'm developing.

I know I can stop explorer.exe (either through the task manager or through the Ctrl-Shift-Right Click on menu / Exit Explorer thing) and restart it through the task manager. That used to work just fine on XP. But on my Windows 7 box it just pops up a file browsing window. No taskbar, no start menu, no desktop.

Of course I can logout or restart to get the taskbar back, but that gets annoying really fast.

Any clues to what's going on here? Is something preventing explorer from restarting the taskbar? What's the mechanism used by explorer to determine whether it should do so?

[Update] I'm not looking for alternative ways to restart explorer. I found plenty of those while Googling for a solution to my problem. I need to know why explorer is not restoring my desktop icons and taskbar after it is restarted.

Solution 1:

Just had the same problem. It seems that when you run explorer.exe without full path it starts as C:\windows\explorer.exe /factory,{682159d9-c321-47ca-b3f1-30e36b2ec8b9} -Embedding, as you see, with parameters.

The solution I found, is to specify full path to C:\Windows\explorer.exe. This should run explorer without parameters. And starts Windows Taskbar.

And I really don't know, why such behaviour happens, cause before it worked fine without full path.

Solution 2:

Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC. Go into Processes and stop Explorer.exe, as you already described. Then go to Applications --> New Task, type in explorer and press Enter.

That should work, if not try and go to Google. Search for explorer.exe and replace it. Good luck!