Anders Hesselbom

How to fix the endless explorer.exe crash-and-restart loop in Windows 11

2023-03-15

After updating Windows 11 to 22621.1413, it got stuck in an endless loop after startup. The desktop environment, explorer.exe, crashed and restarted continuously. This can happen if you are running add-ons on top of explorer.exe, and in my case, I had ExplorerPatcher installed.

When this happens, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and start Task Manager. Find explorer.exe and terminate it. It is not easy because the list flickers, and you need to send the command when the program is actually running. This will stop the flickering of the screen and the system will be free to do other tasks than restarting explorer.exe.

At this point, you cannot run modern UI applications like your computer settings, but you can run classic apps that use the native Windows GUI, like the old control panel. To get the old app for uninstalling applications, run appwiz.cpl. From there you can uninstall whatever extension that causes explorer.exe to crash, in my case ExplorerPatcher.

Now I have to wait for this problem to be fixed before I can install it again. ExplorerPatcher is a program that I really appreciate.

Categories: Geeky

Tags: Windows 11

One response to “How to fix the endless explorer.exe crash-and-restart loop in Windows 11”

1. ej Reed says:

   2023-05-15 at 23:15

   There is a discussion on github about this issue. Windows Defender creates a false positive and quarantines a necessary file.
   If you whitelist the program first, it is still supposed to work?