How to Fix Your Remote Desktop Session When the Taskbar Is Gone

A few weeks back I run into an annoying state with my remote desktop connection. All I could see was this:

A blue screen without any Windows controls or Applications.

There was no Windows taskbar and with that no Start menu. Since this was a production server and everyone else could work, I had to find a solution different than rebooting the server. Disconnecting and reconnecting did not change anything on the session either.

After a few similar problems I got on the right track. My explorer.exe process died or at least was in a state it no longer works. To restart explorer.exe you can do these steps:

  1. Open Task Manager with the key combination CTRL-SHIFT-ESC
  2. Kill the explorer.exe process if it still shows up in Task Manager
  3. Restart explorer.exe from the File -> Run new task menu in the Task Manager

The restart of the explorer.exe was all it needed in my case to get Windows back into a usable state.