Classic Shell: Forum

There's a bug in Windows 7 (maybe other versions as well), where explorer.exe processes are stuck in memory even after their windows have been closed. There's a setting in Folder Options, "Launch folder windows in a separate process", the bug occurs regardless of this setting. Even when it is disabled, all explorer windows are supposed to use the main explorer.exe process but they instead open their own instance of explorer.exe. This new instance doesn't end after the explorer window is closed. Generally it is not a big deal, because the extra processes will often close themselves after a while, but there is at least one case where it does cause an issue for me and that is with the utility TeraCopy. When one of these "stray" explorer.exe processes is in memory, TeraCopy is unable to "hook" in as the default move/copy handler. Killing the stray process(es) manually fixes the problem immediately. I have found a lot of reports on various forums relating to this bug and nobody seems to have a solution. Is this something that Classic Shell could find a workaround for, perhaps by forcing explorer.exe to close when its window is closed?

(I have also mentioned this to the developer of TeraCopy quite some time ago and have not heard back)

I do not believe this is a bug. The process stays around for a bit so if you open another window it reuses the process instead of spinning up a new one. I have seen the second process sometimes even when the setting is disabled, and I suspect it happens when the main process is unresponsive.