Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

Hi,

The other day , When I logged in to my remote machine (Win Server 2008 R2 OS), I did not find my desktop icons and task bar. All I got was an empty blue screen.

Reason –

• A program called explorer.exe controls the display of your taskbar and desktop icons.
• Somehow the process got closed in my remote machine.

Fix –

Below are the steps that helped me to get back my desktop and taskbar.

• Open the task manager
  • Press “Ctrl + Alt + delete” (Local Machine)
  • Press “Ctrl + Shift + Esc” (** For remote machine **)
• Choose “Task Manager” from menu
•  On the Applications  tab, click New Task at the bottom right of the window.
• Type explorer.exe,  then click OK

If that doesn’t work, you need to close and start the processes, if any, try this:

• Open Task Manager.
• Go to the Processes tab.
• Click on the Image Name column header to sort the list alphabetically.
• Find all explorer.exe processes and select each, then click End Process for each one.
• On the Applications tab, click New Task at the bottom right of the window.
• Type explorer.exe, then click OK.

Hope it helps 🙂