A handy trick when things get out of hand

If your Windows Start menu or taskbar is acting strange, or if you're having trouble using File Explorer or Windows Search, you don't have to reboot your system completely to fix the problem.

Instead, restart the Windows Explorer process and the problem will likely go away. Apart from troubleshooting, this is also a quick way to make changes to the graphical user interface and the system registry.

There are several methods to restart Windows Explorer in Microsoft Windows 10 and 11. We will go through them one by one below.