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I'm looking to gracefully exit/terminate Windows Explorer either from the UI or possibly from the command line.

There are many articles out there which explain how to do this in various versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 7 & 8).

There has been one Stack Overflow thread, which discusses exiting Windows Explorer programmatically.

There have been some very detailed & technical responses posted here, so I'm hoping someone on Stack Overflow will actually be able to explain why I do not have the "Exit Explorer" option via the GUI?.

I've tried Ctrl+Shift+Click, Ctrl+Shift+RtClick, Ctrl+Alt+Click, etc. with no luck.

Here is my system info:

  • Win7Ultimate SP1 64bit
  • PentiumD2.8
  • 4GB RAM
  • no pen or touch

Windows7Ultimate.x64.ExitExplorerMissing.png

Perhaps it's a SP1 "fix" or a problem with the 64bit version? Somehow it was turned off.

In addition, is there a command line method to "Exit Explorer" gracefully? (afaik taskkill is the same as killing the process in Task Manager, & is not graceful.)

Glorfindel
  • 4,158
George 2.0 Hope
  • 684

3 Answers3

1

To gracefully exit explorer in Windows 10 you right-click the task bar while holding down Ctrl+Shift. The context menu which then appears shows an "Exit Explorer" entry.

For Windows 7 it used be a right-click with Ctrl-Shift on the Shutdown button in the star menu. [Given here for reference since it is not mentioned in original question.]

Christian K.
  • 141
1

Perhaps it's UAC issue. Are you sure your user has Admin rights?

Also, taskkill can be used to send a couple different signals to processes. I believe that using the default taskkill tells the process to clean up its space (as well as prompting for unsaved files if needed) and "gracefully" terminate. If that can't be done for some reason, then you taskkill /F to forcefully terminate the process.

Ariel
  • 984
0

Workaround

Use the keyboard way:

  1. Win+M
  2. Alt+F4
  3. Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Esc

References

Community
  • 1
and31415
  • 14,901