I believe many of you experience Explorer.exe crashing before especially during Windows 98 era. This is mostly due to corrupted Windows, spywares or unstable software that has not been extensively tested.
Once explorer.exe crash, most of your icons in your traybar which located at the bottom right will disappear.

You might also see that everything in your desktop and taskbar went missing for a while and then comes back again. Windows is somehow smart enough to restart it’s explorer.exe when it crashes but it’s not smart enough to restore the icons of running programs in your traybar. Don’t get me wrong, the program is still running, but it’s hidden and you have no way of bringing it back. What I used to do is to go to Task Manager, kill the process and run the software again.

There’s a way you can bring back the hidden running applications without killing the process and running it again…


Win-Res-Q (read “win rescue”) is a simple utility that restores (shows) hidden windows.

It can be used for bringing back your “lost” applications after their tray icons disappear following Explorer crashes that abundantly occur on Windows 98(It also happens on Windows XP!). It’s also useful for exposing strange, hidden windows lurking around your desktop.

Very simple software and easy to use. Win-Res-Q shows a list of running applications, you choose the application that you’d like to restore/show, and click on the left button below. The middle button is to refresh the list of running applications and the right button is show the About/Credit screen of Win-Res-Q.

[ Download Win-Res-Q 1.0 ]