I ran Fileseek yesterday and only closed it today. I'm running Windows 10 up-to-date. When I closed it, I got the UAC. After okaying it, it said it was closing files. At this point, the desktop on Windows 10 disappeared. Soon after it failed and I had to abort the setup. This leaves me with open applications but no taskbar. Displayfusion is running, so I have alt+tab support so I could get to a browser to type this.

I am going to try to bring up the desktop explorer using Taskman after posting this. I will attach a DF troubleshooter that I generated just minutes before this problem occurred, but only after I have file explorer support back online.

EDIT: The hack of killing all explorer windows and using Run... in Taskman to start up the desktop worked. Attaching the file, now. And the updater now that I can run FileSeek again.

Here's the FileSeek troubleshooter. Going to turn on detailed log and choose Install on Exit again.

EDIT: And this time the updater ran successfully without causing any issues. Turned off debugging as there's likely nothing useful.

Yes, please make it a high priority to remove this wrong-headed behavior! It is unforgivable to suddenly close the Explorer shell without any choice (or even warning) to the user.

This just happened to me as well. I've manually restarted the Explorer shell, but things are never the same when you have to do that; many applications that had registered themselves to the notification area (the tray) are not smart enough to re-register when Explorer crashes and is restarted, so you lose access to their tray icon functionality.