What's the cleanest way to programmatically kill and restart explorer.exe?

Posted by Paul Accisano on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Paul Accisano
Published on 2010-05-14T06:35:06Z Indexed on 2010/05/14 6:44 UTC
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installer

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Windows

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explorer

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process

Greetings all,

I'm working on a Windows program whose installation necessitates restarting explorer.exe. I know "Reboot your computer to complete the installation" is the standard method here, but I'd like my installer to give users the option of just restarting Explorer so they can start using my program immediately. What's the best way to do that? Of course I could just find and kill the process, but that seems rather icky. Is there some trick to, say, make Explorer think the user is logging off and close cleanly?

Thanks!

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