Why does explorer restart automatically when I kill it with Process.Kill?

Question

If I kill explorer.exe like this:

private static void KillExplorer()
{
    var processes = Process.GetProcessesByName("explorer");
    Console.Write("Killing Explorer... ");
    foreach (var process in processes)
    {
        process.Kill();
        process.WaitForExit();
    }
    Console.WriteLine("Done");
}

It restarts immediately.

But if I use taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe, or kill it from the task manager, it doesn't restart.

Why is that? What's the difference? How can I close explorer.exe from code without restarting it? Sure, I could call taskkill from my code, but I was hoping for a cleaner solution...

Solution

I can't say that I haven't cheated to get the answer. All credits go to morguth for his post here.

What he has suggested (and proved work on my Win7 and XPMode) is that there is a registry key that forces the shell to restart automatically. By using the following code you disable that.

RegistryKey ourKey = Registry.LocalMachine;
ourKey = ourKey.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon", true);
ourKey.SetValue("AutoRestartShell", 0);
// Kill the explorer by the way you've post and do your other work
ourKey.SetValue("AutoRestartShell", 1)

Comments

[t3hn00b]

What Windows version are you using?

[Dan Barzilay]

stackoverflow.com/questions/2570244/…

[Jodrell]

Are you trying to write a kiosk app?

[Thomas Levesque]

@t3hn00b, I tried it on XP and 7, with the same results.

[Thomas Levesque]

@DanBarzilay, the accepted answer to this question doesn't work, and the others are not very helpful either. Please don't close.

[Thomas Levesque]

@Jodrell, no, I'm trying to write a setup for an application; the application installs a shell extension, so I need to kill explorer before I can overwrite a previous installation.

[Thomas Levesque]

Why was this post migrated? It has nothing to do on SuperUser...

[Thomas Levesque]

Thanks for you answer. I've seen this post before, but it doesn't seem like a very good idea to change a system-wide setting just for a one-shot action. What if a crash occurs after you set the value to 0 and before you set it back to 1?

[t3hn00b]

@ThomasLevesque well my home Win has that option disabled (set to 0) that's why I've asked you about the Windows version (I thought it was version specific). So I think nothing problematic will happen yet you can test it yourself - googling around didn't show any strange behaviour. NVidia driver installer kills the explorer when installing new drivers, so if they do it (and they probably do it roughly the same way) I doubt anything really dangerous might happen. Yet it's up to you and your requirements.

[Community]

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