Restart PC via remote desktop with Explorer.exe dead

Question

I have a very unusual situation in which I am remote desktoping to my Windows 7 PC from my laptop. The Explorer.exe process has been killed so therefore the Start menu etc isn't available. So there fore there is very little I can do with my PC. So I need to restart my PC. How can I restart my PC after the Explorer.exe process has been killed?

Answer 1

You could go into Task Manager within the remote desktop session by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.

1. Click File
2. Click New Task (Run...)
3. Type explorer.exe and click OK

That will instantly restart the Explorer shell without the need to restart your PC.

Answer 2

If you can send a ctrl-alt-del to the remote computer, then you should be able to launch the task manager. From there you can click File->New Task. Launch the command prompt (cmd.exe).

From there, you can restart the computer with a 1 second delay with the following command:

shutdown /r /t 1

Answer 3

Sometimes I've found that I can't even use Ctrl+Alt+Delete or Ctrl+Alt+End, so I've found another workaround:

1. Open Remote Desktop
2. Before you hit connect, click the options drop-down
3. Go to the Programs tab
4. Check the box that says "Start the Following program on Connection"
5. Enter 'explorer' (without quotes) into the Program Path and File Name Box
6. Connect Normally

I've had a similar issue with one of our work VM instances and it's a pain to have to get I.T. to reboot it all the time, and I couldn't seem to open Task Manager when the instance was in this state.

Answer 4

In my case Ctrl+Shift+Esc did not work, so I did a remote restart as explained in this guide. From your local PC, run the following in cmd.exe:

shutdown /r /m \\remotepcname

This worked for me as I was using the same domain account on both machines. Depending on how your domain and group policy is set up, it may or may not work for you.

Answer 5

There are situations where the desktop background is visible and the mouse pointer works, but Explorer is dead and ctrl-alt-del and shift-ctrl-esc don't do anything, even though the keyboard is active and can be used to exit the screensaver. Remote Desktop is functional but doesn't help or provide any more functionality than at the host computer.

I believe this happens when Windows Update / Microsoft Update has initiated a reboot, but something is preventing the final shutdown. If the power button is configured for sleep or hibernate, there's apparently no way to recover from this; upon wake or return from hibernation, you end up right where you were. I usually end up just pulling the plug so on my next boot I'd be prompted whether to start Windows normally.

Answer 6

If you are on a tenkeyless keyboard (without end key) and ctrl+shift+esc doesnt go through. You can make the end key by doing fn+right arrow. Which makes the full command to launch task manager ctrl+shift+fn+right arrow.

Answer 7

Short answer: Kill the SVCHOST.exe process. There's probably lots of them. When a certain one is killed, a STOP error is forced. In a normal configuration the default action after the debug files are generated is that the system reboots.

It is possible if the system has a history of STOP errors, someone could have configured it to not reboot after the STOP error (so they can see the error on the screen). But this would have been an intentional and very specific change from the default behavior in Windows going all the way back to Windows NT in the 90's.

Long answer: Had my RDP session go a little weird and used command line to tell the system to restart. Got a full screen Windows 10 message that said "Restarting" and then it just sat there. Waited a while but it did not budge. I disconnected and reconnected the RDP session - still there. I used Atera to connect to the console - same message.

Atera still gave access to the system, but it's functions to force the system to restart didn't make any difference either.

Atera also gave me command line access. I have sysinternals installed on that computer so I used the command PSKILL SVCHOST

And 2 minutes later I could RDP to my offsite computer again.

You can do this from Task Manager as well, but you could find a hundred SVCHOST processes to kill one by one, before you get the one that triggers the restart.

I found this little quirk of SVCHOST the hard way in the early days of Windows 2000. I'm not sure if I've ever seen it published anywhere.

And best of the all the reboot fixed my offsite computer and the start menu/search works again.