Restarting explorer.exe only opens an explorer window

I had this same problem and found that all the solutions here still didn't work from a batch script.

None of these worked completely:

start explorer.exe
start explorer
explorer.exe
explorer

because they all either opened a window (and didn't show the taskbar again), or the batch script then hung thereafter and couldn't execute any more commands

I found that this line in the batch file did work (after killing explorer.exe):

start "" "%windir%\explorer.exe"

and also allowed other commands to be executed after it in the script

I think user1631170 is on to something, "I wonder if some part of Win-RAR is running in 32-bit mode? Could you even start explorer64 running from a 32-bit process? I am pretty certain that Windows won't do that."

When I start explorer.exe from ProcessHacker (32-bit process manager), I get an explorer window.

But I can force it to start the 64-bit explorer with this:

%systemroot%\sysnative\cmd.exe /c start /B explorer.exe

sysnative is a keyword that Windows recognizes to bypass the file system redirection for 32-bit/64-bit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa384187(v=vs.85).aspx Enjoy!