Windows 10: Can't kill explorer.exe and more...

So my laptop froze in the middle of web browsing and I had to force shutdown.

Upon rebooting back to desktop and running my cleanup bat script, explorer.exe is showing strange behavior where I couldn't kill it (this is part of the bat script). So I rebooted again to desktop but this time I didn't run my cleanup script, instead I attempted to kill explorer.exe myself with both taskmgr and taskkill, no luck. The desktop vanished, but the process is still in the list. taskkill couldn't kill explorer.exe because "there is no instance of this process running".

pskill or pskill64 from Sysinternals reported false success after one run and then failure afterwards ("access denied").

After a few similar experiments. I found a temporary solution. Before logging into desktop, sleep, then wake up and log in. After that everything went well (I think).

I suspect that this may be software related but I didn't install anything for the past few weeks. In fact the latest installation was cygwin, then Firefox beta. For hardware, the problematic Mediatek MT7630E Wi-Fi driver is the source of all my frustration but disabling it does not solve the problem.


Anyone knows what's going on?

:)

 

Can't create folders in Windows 10 file folder

More info: while the right-click menu froze (e.g., right clicked an html file and then clicked Open With), I killed a dllhost.exe process (but no thread number) in the Analyze Wait Chain of explorer.exe (in Task Manager). Then (before Windows or explorer.exe
was restarted) the issue was gone (e.g. an html file could be opened with Edge from the Open With menu).

 

Explorer.exe Server Execution Failed

I had accidentally killed Explorer.exe from a batch file. After restarting it, I get the following error: "Explorer.exe - Server Execution Failed". Please help.

 

Hi TD070VA1 and welcome to Tenforums.

You could pick some kind of malware, when browser crashed. Try checking with Malwarebytes and ADWcleaner. Rkil could be helpful, if malware detects other apps and prevent them to run.

to be clear: I'm nut sure that this is malware related....