Relaunching explorer.exe on Server 2012

Question

_{Monday, February 4, 2013 4:51 PM}

Recent, clean installation of Windows Server 2012 Datacenter on new hardware, fully patched.

Both explorer.exe and  Desktop Window Manager were down.  ("The Desktop Window Manager has exited with code 0xd00002fe", then eight minutes later, "The following application was terminated because it was hung: explorer.exe".)  I'm chasing down the root cause elsewhere.

My question here is, how can I relaunch explorer.exe in 2012?

In past versions of Windows, if explorer.exe crashed, I would use Ctrl-Shift-Esc or Ctrl-Alt-Delete to launch Task Manager, then use Task Manager to launch explorer.exe. 

When I was having this problem with 2012, I could pull up the Start Page, but clicking on anything including Task Manager, CMD, etc., would just take me back to my black desktop.

Thank you for any insight.

Tim C

All replies (4)

_{Monday, May 13, 2013 5:28 PM ✅Answered}

It appears that an intermittent problem with the Windows Update service was impacting all of the other services in its shared Service Host process, causing a soft crash condition.  Killing the process clears the soft crash.  Isolating the Windows Update service in a dedicated process prevents the soft crash.  We are still investigating the root cause and a permanent fix for the Windows Update problem.  (When it takes a couple weeks to reproduce a problem, troubleshooting is slow.)  But that's a different thread.

Thank you.

Tim C

_{Tuesday, February 5, 2013 12:27 AM}

Same way you've always been accessing it, hit Ctrl+alt+Del and select the Task Manager option.  Now if you have Server Core installed then you have no explorer to run as is running a basic shell.

Be kind and Mark as Answer if I helped.

_{Wednesday, February 6, 2013 11:17 PM}

Chris,

That wasn't my experience.  I must have had additional things going wrong behind the scenes.

Thank you.

Tim C

_{Saturday, March 16, 2013 10:00 AM}

Upgrading to S2012 is the root of your problem.

"Tim Curwick" wrote in message ...

Chris,

That wasn't my experience.  I must have had additional things going wrong behind the scenes.

Thank you.

Tim C

Tomás Mason