I have a nice little legacy program on one of the computers I work with regularly. This program causes a bit of instability so I have become accustomed to Explorer crashing. Therefore I have a good remedy for that.
When Explorer crashes (menus don’t work and windows have problems) just hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open the Task Manager and right click on explorer.exe in the left hand column and select “End Process.” Your interface for much of Windows will now disappear.
While still in the Task Manager go to the File menu and select “New Task (Run…)” and in the dialog box that appears just type “explorer” no path, no .exe, just explorer. Everything (except the program that was causing the problem) should reappear.
This has rescued lots of unsaved work for me in the past and gives you a crutch to hobble on until you can do a real reboot. If things are really bad you may need to repeat the process a couple times.
If you only knew how many times I do this in a day…. i thought it was something everyone knew how to do… but not everyone removes virus’ from laptops and desktops on a daily basis like me either.