If you are a power user of Windows Vista (your are if you are following HackTrix ;) ), then you probably know that you can simply restart windows explorer to make windows reload the registry. This make it easier to test registry hacks without restarting the computer.
The usual way to restart windows explorer’s process is this,
1. Open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc keys.
2. Choose the Processes tab. Find explorer.exe, right click on it and click on End Process.
This will terminate the explorer’s process.
3. To restart it, open task manager again by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc keys.
4. Go to File > Run, type explorer, and press enter.
This procedure of restarting windows explorer has one drawback. If multiple instances of explorer are running, you need to end each of them one by one.
However, you can easily kill all running instances of windows explorer on windows vista, in single click, to do so,
1. Click on the Start button to open the start menu.
2. While pressing Ctrl+Shift keys, click anywhere in the empty space, as shown in the image,
This will open a new pop up menu. Click on Exit Explorer in it. This will terminate all the running instances of windows explorer’s process.
To restart it, use this same procedure explained in the step 3 above.
