Windows 7: Tweak will make Your seven easier ;)

I personally have a liking for the old quicklaunch bar which I use on Windows 7 and remove all pinned icons from the taskbar. Then I dragged the Computer icon from the desktop to the quicklaunch which created a shortcut and now I have a shortcut that opens on Computer without openning a new explorer.exe process.

And, opening new instances only increases the mem footprint without creating a new explorer process.

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Furthermore, closing all Explorer windows does not kill the process or release all the memory.

Beautiful.

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I am testing with my own shortcut, it does not open a new process.
It does ramp up the memory used by explorer.exe.
My shortcut functions exactly like the desktop shortcut, Computer.

In my testing the memory is released, just not immediately.
It takes a few minutes. 3-4 minutes to be exact.

To create the quicklaunch, I used an AutoIt script acquired from here
The script needs to be compiled and functions on English systems only, and the quicklaunch it creates can be disabled using a rightclick on the taskbar, browsing to toolbar, and unchecking 'quick launch'. I could have provided you with a compiled exe but that would take all the fun out of it.

I do see that the memory is released after a few minutes.

OK.

After further testing, I am hapy to report -

The tweak provided in the long standing SF tutorial works properly. Yes, multiple instances of Explorer.exe occur in Task Manager. Yes, their slightly higher combined memory usage is greater than the sum total of multiple windows using the default link. Yes, the instances stay resident once the window is closed.

BUT, all instances close out of TaskMan after a short duration after the window is closed.

The tweak behaves properly in terms of min/max.

This may be odd behavior, but the tweak meets the usage requirements of the Antman.

i'm afraid of mice :(

WinKey-E will open up Windows Explorer as desired WITHOUT any
'tweaking' at all.

cheers
Catherine

Wait a minute. Opening any Windows explorer window, regardless of the tweak or not, will have a second instance of explorer.exe after it is closed, that isn't released until a minute or two has passed.

Roger that.

The alarm was multiple instances, many more than two. The tweak causes many. Untweaked causes two.

@catherine - I don't like using my keyboard.

My work is done here. I will take my embarassment with me.

The %windir% is the correct command to use. I have updated Limneos's post to replace %systemroot%.