Programs that were launched with impossible command line options

Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by userbinator on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:46AM (#29835442)

I was a little mystified when I read the following sentence, since the start menu (and taskbar) has in my experience always been part of explorer.exe, and not a separate process (unless he was referring to explorer.exe itself, which I've killed and restarted a few times without issue, so that couldn't be it either):

And one of the programs that this utility decide was not worthy of keeping around was the Start menu, so it terminated it when your game started. And then when the game was over, it relaunched it.

...and then all became clear shortly after:

But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments, and it is supposed to be run in a low integrity app container.

Raymond is obviously going to be pro-MS, but I can't decide whether the ultimate blame here is the third-party utility, or MS for the design decision that somehow the start menu needs to be its own process, require commandline arguments and whatever starts it to do something special (unlike explorer.exe, which establishes its own environment appropriately) or indeed the whole shitshow that is UWP.

It seems people have tried replacing the shell with one from an older version of Windows, but it's not a direct drop-in (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsbU73Idx4 , warning: audio is useless); with some additional work, I suppose it might be possible.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by Swisstone on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:53AM (#29835492)

The fact the start menu lives in its own process is an implementation detail, no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe, so no one should expect start menu to be part of explorer.exe. Third party utilities should never kill random processes to begin with... that's a non-sense.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by userbinator on Friday January 07, 2022 @03:08AM (#29836377)

no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe

I'm pretty sure the older versions of Windows actually had that in the (much more detailed) documentation they came with.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by _3u10 on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:17AM (#29835654)

Why shouldn’t they kill processes? If the OS didn’t want third party apps to be able to kill random processes it wouldn’t provide APIs for it to do so.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by ComputerGuru on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:59AM (#29835537)

Killing and restarting explorer.exe on Windows 10 is not supported and causes UWP apps to fail to interop with the system afterwards (even apps launched after explorer.exe was terminated).

Go ahead and do it, then try to open a link in the UWP mail app by clicking on it. It doesn’t work for me ever after until I reboot my PC.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by userbinator on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:17AM (#29835652)

This further reinforces why I've fortunately never had to --- and don't ever want to --- use UWP apps. It seems like one horrible design decision after another.

On the other hand, explorer.exe seemingly wants to crash or hang semi-regularly, especially when accessing network drives, and needs to be killed and restarted to regain control.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by RinTohsaka on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:25AM (#29835708)

Can someone explains why explorer crashes when dragging files (unintentionally) over an offline mapped network drive?

I feel like this is a basic thing that should have come up in testing.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by userbinator on Friday January 07, 2022 @05:43AM (#29837546)

Network filesystems seem to be one of those things that's remarkably tricky to get right; my experience with that on Linux hasn't been much better, i.e. mounted drives that have become disconnected can cause anything from tens-of-minutes-long waits to forever hangs. I think it's a tension between giving up too easily (and thus you get errors in applications whenever the network is even slightly intermittent) and trying too hard to reconnect (permanent hangs, in the case of infinite retries.)

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by lostmsu on Tuesday January 11, 2022 @11:49PM (#29902453)

Seems to be working fine on my machine.

I went to Task Manager, details tab; found explorer.exe (there was exactly 1) and killed it

Hit File -> Run New Task; Entered "explorer"; hit Enter

Switched to Mail and clicked a link in one of the emails - it worked.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by voldacar on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:43AM (#29835824)

>Killing and restarting explorer.exe on Windows 10 is not supported

so what are you supposed to do if explorer hangs or freezes?

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by ComputerGuru on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:25PM (#29841865)

That's the question, right? The official answer appears to be "it can't/doesn't happen" ... and when it does, you really do have to reboot.

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Re:Programs that were launched with impossible command line ... by voldacar on Friday January 07, 2022 @01:10PM (#29842526)

Unfortunate. That exact situation has happened to me multiple times on win7 and killing and restarting explorer.exe always seemed to work. Really poor systems design from Microsoft here

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