In this case it's a good thing. I used to use a piece of software called ExplorerPatcher but, as with nearly all patchers, it has the possibility to break after an update, as it did, causing Explorer to get stuck in a crash loop while I tried to figure out how to uninstall the thing without any access to the file explorer (or the start menu to find anything else to run). I didn't remember Control Panel was control.exe.

I managed to do it by downloading the setup with wget and executing it with an uninstall flag, but that was really scary.

Glad I'll get taskbar labels and clock seconds back soon. <3