Some changes you make to your computer may not show up immediately. For example, if you edit the registry you’ll often find that the new settings you put in place do not take effect until you restart your computer. But a full restart can take too long! If you want to get things sorted out faster, you can try just restarting Explorer instead.
The same technique can also be used to overcome problems that arise in Explorer and other areas of Windows. Rather than restarting your computer completely, just restart this key process to see if that helps.
Right click the Taskbar and select the Task Manager option. If you can’t do this for some reason — it may be that the Taskbar is not responding — you can use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc keyboard shortcut to call up the Task Manager.
Locate the File Explorer entry in the list of running processes, right click it can select the Restart option.
A similar technique can be used to manually launch Explorer should it crash for some reason. In the Task Manager click the File menu and select Run new task before typing explorer.exe and pressing Enter.
These are handy tricks to know that could get you out of a sticky spot!