The quick answer if you've been forced to "kill" the Windows core "explorer" process and can no longer see the "Start" menu or the task bar: Open the task manager (with ctrl-alt-delete) and use the "run" command to start "explorer".
If you had to do that, its probably because you had to kill a runaway app. That used to be a pretty rare thing until web 2.0. Now its a couple of times a week -- if not a couple of times a day -- that some crazed web monkey takes over your computer and won't give it back until you kill the process -- and probably a bunch of others that it has kicked off.
Sometimes you have to crush the Windows core "Explorer" itself. Boo. It doesn't kill Windows, but it pretty much closes off your access to doing anyting useful with it until you restart Explorer.
It's sort of like restarting Windows without really stopping it in the first place.
The web is a wonderful thing. Except in the hands of a "web site designer".
Well; to be fair, I really mean "except in the hands of a web site designer with too much knowledge of Flash or Silverlight or whatever but with no sense of taste, decorum or just the fact that other humans have other stuff to do besides sit around waiting for their ill-crafted "features" to load.
Your regular tastefully informative website designers... God bless'em and more power to them.
The former group, however, make web life miserable by bogging down browser security systems with stuff to check and bogging down servers with huge junky things to download which, invariably, include the niftiest new bit of logging/tracking/mind-melding crap from some idiot ad agency, not to mention calling multiple instances of media players and their support services requiring more security system scans. All collectivelyslamming all of your CPU cores to 110%, eating all of your RAM, and basically bringing any but the most ultimate of ultimate-gaming machines to their knees.
When you find that your PC hasn't really frozen but is still pretty much just sitting there doing nothing 30 seconds or so after navigating to a new web page, this is probably what you've run into. The fruits of an inept or inconsiderate (or both) web designer.
If you wait a few more seconds you'll start hearing the fans in your computer speed up and the disk light go from mad flickering to solid burn as page swapping becomes its main activity.
If you're lucky the web page parts will start finalizing their loads and control of your PC will gradually return to you like the tingly buzz of life coming back to a foot that's gone to sleep.
But, once in awhile it just takes too long. At least for me. So I curse the web site designers and call Process Explorer or Task Manager or whatever and start killing off the processes that are dragging down the computer. It almost always involves multiple instances of media players, but sometimes, in order to get those to stop you just have to chase the process tree all the way down to "Explorer".
When you do that you lose your Windows task bar and, with it, easy control of your Windows environment.
Fortunately you can get it back without doing an ugly forced shut down and losing unsaved data in still running apps.
Open the task manager of your choice with Ctrl-Alt-Del and then find the "Run new process" feature on it. When asked, type in "explorer" and hit "Enter".
Your Windows environment will start up anew. It will do all the things that "Startup" usually does, like starting your antivirus services and so on, but once it's done you'll have your Windows back under your control.
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