How often do you update ExplorerPatcher? Everytime a pre-release build comes out?
Yes, that's how I prefer to do it. I am registered on GitHub; after you log in you can add projects to your watchlist with an option to enable email notifications.
Or just wait for the next stable build?
No, the pre-releases tend to be often important too, especially after Microsoft changes something about the UI of Windows 11 through a new Cumulative Update which can break ExplorerPatcher (or partially break it). On Patch Tuesdays, after a new CU gets installed by Windows Update, then during the next reboot that finalizes the install of the new CU, you might want to check if ExplorerPatcher adds a notification in Notification Center. It should inform you on whether ExplorerPatcher successfully downloaded new symbols from Microsoft.
Sometimes it can happen that it was unable to download these symbols or was unable to download all of them. If rebooting again next doesn't make this problem go away, usually it's becasue Microsoft has not yet published the new symbols, in which case usually they will be published within the next day, after which choosing to reboot once more should finally do the trick. Until the new symbols are downloaded, some features in ExplorerPatcher might be disabled, at least if these features depend on the symbols. But a lot of the features do not rely on the symbols.
To avoid bumping into the kind of problems that go away by themselves after I choose to reboot, what I like to do is, I always reboot
before these problems can occur. That is, I reboot again each time after it reports that it successfully downloaded all of the new symbols. Similarly, each time after I changed one or more settings in ExplorerPatcher that require explorer to be restarted, I consider to reboot also, like, just in case, but I don't tend to change these settings that often anyway.
If the explorer process crashes so that the desktop and taskbar disappear, you can press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to bring up Task Manager. In there, you can click on Run new task. Doing this will bring up a box that is similar to the Run dialog (Win + R). So you can start explorer again by typing
explorer in the box, then pressing Enter. (Leave the checkbox unchecked.) Normally explorer shouldn't crash; as a matter of fact it is stable for me on both laptops, and always has been that, but after finalizing the install of a new CU it can still happen when Windows starts.
It's been a while since the last time when this happend to me after a new CU was installed. If you start explorer by using Task Manager like how I explained above, then if explorer crashes again immediately after, you can uninstall ExplorerPatcher by typing
%programfiles%\ExplorerPatcher\ep_setup /uninstall in the box, then pressing Enter. This is how I have always been able to fix it in a matter of only minutes. But then, I can't even remember when was the last time since I needed to re-install ExplorerPatcher.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been using the Windows 10 taskbar option, the Simple Window Switcher option, and the File Explorer | Control Interface: Windows 10 Ribbon option. Again, it's been working rather flawlessly for me alongside Open-Shell. As for how it compares to things like the new File Explorer of Windows 11. There is no comparison.
www.elevenforum.com
). So, I'm not too worried. He's been working pretty hard getting the new Windows 10 taskbar look-alike to work, it's still a work in progress for now, but I think he's already made a good start. Re-implementing the whole taskbar basically from scratch is no easy task. Even so, the addition of this new feature [that is still in its early experimental stage] shouldn't affect stability if you don't use the feature. In time, he will get there.
