re: Settings perfect, disappear sometimes anyway
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Ron Anderson
(5 messages posted)
I've answered your question below, but first:
The real cause of this problem is a missed notification. When a minimized task requires
input, windows notifies you by flashing the taskbar button orange for a few seconds,
then leaves the button displayed and highlighted. Those of us who use auto-hide
have the added benefit of having our taskbar locked open. A windows bug causes the
highlighting to sometimes be lost, but windows is still waiting for you to click
on that one button--the one for that minimized task requiring your input. Since
the highlighting has been lost, the only way to click the right button is to click
every button one at a time until you eventually click the appropriate one. The
taskbar will then revert to normal. (btw, don't click them through them too quickly--usually
a rate of one button per second works best. A pain, I know, but it works and consistently
for me.
To answer your question, Explorer.exe is what controls the task bar, the desktop,
Windows Explorer, all the visual components you use to interact with Windows. When
you use "end process" on "explorer.exe", it is literally forcing it to stop running.
Most of the time, Windows will detect that it has stopped running and will automatically
restart Explorer.exe. During that restart, it rebuilds the task bar as best as it
can by detecting what is currently running. You should note that it doesn't always
work, and when that happens you are left with a blank screen. The only option
at that point that I am aware of is to power off your PC. I suspect this is the
scenario being referred to when the user suggested that you do a "run", "new process".
The problem is that when the "end process" on explorer.exe doesn't work, the run
command is no longer available.
Hope this helped.
On Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 3:37 pm, Ellee wrote:
>Thank you. As a neophyte, I need more detailed instructions, please. In Task manager
>I clicked on explorer.exe and then end task, but got a warning message that this
>could cause loss of data and system instability, so I was afraid to go through with
>that until I got reassurances. Also, instructions say to click "run + new process."
> I do not see that in Task Manager. I clicked Start and then clicked Run and typed
>in new process, but that was not recognized. Would you mind spelling this out for
>me. I would very much appreciate it!
>
>
>
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